Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent)

I support Senator Boyhan in terms of a review. The Minister said that she has to put a figure in the Bill but there is absolutely nothing to stop her including a review mechanism in the Bill. I believe it would be appropriate that there would be a clear mechanism to review the sum of €3,000, which is clearly and, potentially, going to be very inadequate. My amendment No. 26 touches on this and a number of other issues.

As we start another chapter with the dissolution of one body and creation of another, one thing that has frustrated some of us - this legislation focuses on residential institutional abuse - is that there have been many iterations of institutional abuse in different forms, including institutional abuse in respect of schools, hospitals in terms of symphysiotomy, mother and baby homes, and Magdalen laundries. We had all these schemes, projects and initiatives and there seems to be a lack of learning. The State has repeatedly failed or been complicit, or even intentional, in terms of the abuse that people have experienced in institutions and similar mistakes are made again and again with the redress schemes. It is my opinion that they are mistakes and I call for an examination and genuine interrogation of what best practice actually looks like and what we should have done differently. The Minister has heard from people about the fact that engagement with redress bodies in itself has often been a gruelling, abusive and upsetting experience for survivors of institutional abuse. Too much of the time we have heard stories whereby it has been, in some cases, re-tramautising to access redress from the State rather than the healing process that it should be. We have identified a few areas where learning and reflection are needed.I ask the Minister to commit to producing a report that says the State will start learning from these things, so that we are not just dissolving, moving to the next bit and listening to the small issues of each particular project.

We say again that a report on the adequacy and best practice around survivors of residential institutional abuse is needed and, first, the adequacy of the healthcare, educational and financial supports. When the Bill was introduced to the House last year, survivor Tom Cronin stated that "the Government is using this Bill to masquerade the fact that it has ignored the views of survivors ... the Government has repeatedly consulted survivors and then ignored them." Their lived experience needs to be crucial to the supports and the question of the adequacy or appropriateness of the supports. Campaigners have described the €3,000 one-off payment for former residents living abroad as deeply insufficient. I will not go into this again because Senator Boyhan has been very articulate in expressing the needs of survivors who are living abroad or have been forced to travel abroad.

Campaigners have highlighted the issue around financial supports and the need to link them to the cost of living; the need for additional payments and supports for survivors who have complex health needs; and the need for specific pension entitlements for survivors aged over 65 years because of the years of unpaid labour, the lack of education and the subsequent lack of opportunity which is reflected in poverty in their pension years. They have highlighted the physical and psychological impact of the abuse and the impact that has on a lifetime's earnings. This is also absent from the Bill.

In terms of medical supports, there have been calls for access to the HAA medical card. The Minister indicated this card was provided to only one group under the hepatitis C scheme and she did not want to create a hierarchy of supports between survivors of abuse in the Magdalen laundries and the mother and baby homes and residential institutions. I agree. The clear benefits of the HAA card should be made available to all survivors.

The education committee has made clear that access to education is critical to address the long-term intergenerational effects of residential institutional abuse. It suggests the legislation should make express provision for educational supports for survivors and their families, including a non-means tested bursary with individual cash grants.

The Bill restricts supports only to survivors and does not address the issues of intergenerational loss of opportunity and the intergenerational trauma and damage that has been done when a parent has suffered from residential institutional abuse, for example. The Bill provides that the Minister may make an individual assessment of each application in terms of education.

There is a litany of concerns. The Bill is also restricted to those who have already received awards under the Residential Institutions Redress Act, which includes survivors, many of whom are in their 70s and 80s. We know those are the people the State should never turn its back on, namely, those who have not had opportunities or the capacity, for different reasons, to engage with redress schemes up to this point.

Our amendment would have a report done that looks to an assessment of the adequacy of those healthcare, educational and financial supports, not how much is left in the pot but what is adequate for the needs of those affected. It would also examine the issue of the restriction to survivors' qualification for redress. We spoke of this in relation to the appalling and arbitrary restriction of access to redress for survivors of mother and baby homes who had spent the vital first six months of their lives in institutions and women who had been in them for their birth. In many cases, we know these births were deeply traumatic. These survivors were explicitly excluded because somehow we drew an arbitrary line to say someone's experience of giving birth in a situation that was abusive or a person's experience of spending the first six months of their life in a residential institution, in this case, a mother and baby home, is somehow not relevant. It was not necessary to draw a line or to exclude those persons who had experienced that residential abuse.

The adequacy of healthcare, educational and financial supports is a concern. The application of restrictions on survivors' qualification for redress is also a concern. To make a comparison of the adequacy of redress supports, some people who have applied seem to have been treated well while others who applied have been treated very poorly. Different schemes have changed. On the use of waivers, it is an incredible indignity and wrong to require those who are receiving redress because they have been the victims of abuse to waive their rights in order to access that redress. This appalling practice, which has been used again and again, goes against everything we know about restorative justice. I am looking for some learning on all of these issues.

The last element in our report relates to recommendations for best practice going forward, including the establishment of a special advocate, for which a case has been strongly made. We can talk about sums of €3,000 and €50,000 and where they will go. Where is the evidence that the State is not just sorry for this individual situation, for bad practice and for yet another area of failed oversight where we outsourced our responsibilities to persons who behaved in an abusive way but is also learning and driving its way towards actual best practice and doing better than the redress schemes we have to date? In this report, we are asking the Minister to point an arrow to the future and say we will learn and review, as Senator Boyhan said, and address these issues further.