Patricia Stephenson (Social Democrats)

Last week's announcement of a commission of investigation into historical abuse is welcome, but it is not enough. The scope of the inquiry is too narrow and by design it risks repeating the mistakes of the past. Sexual abuse is one part, a truly devastating part, of a much wider, darker history in our State. It is a history that includes physical violence, emotional cruelty, forced family separation and the selling of Irish children into adoption overseas. This all happened with the knowledge of the State, and often with the complicity of the institutions of both church and State. Nowhere is this more visible than in Tuam, where work begins this week on the painful process of the exhumation of the remains of the 796 babies and children buried there. Our thoughts this week and in the coming weeks should be with the mothers, children and families affected by this awful scenario. We also have other sites like it, such as Bessborough House.

Catherine Corless, working without funding or any fanfare, uncovered the truth of what happened to the Tuam babies, the unmarked graves, the hidden past and the institutional silence. What she revealed was not just a local scandal; it was a national reckoning. However, to this day, we have not fully responded to that reckoning. We have not given those children or their mothers the justice they deserve.

Now, once again, with this limited commission we are drawing artificial boundaries around suffering. We are saying to survivors of forced adoption, to mothers who still do not know where their babies are buried and to families excluded from redress schemes because of arbitrary timelines that their pain is not enough. Let us remember that just last week the Supports for Survivors of Residential Institutional Abuse Bill passed by the Government excluded many women and children who suffered in the so-called mother and baby homes. This exclusion was not just a technicality. It was the arbitrary shutting out of anyone who had not lived in one of these homes for more than six months. That has caused real harm and pain to the people who were excluded.

If we are serious about truth, justice and reconciliation, we cannot keep siloing suffering. We cannot keep revisiting our past piecemeal and asking survivors to relive their trauma just to be heard. The commission must be all-encompassing once and for all. It must include sexual, physical and emotional abuse, forced family separation and the system of institutional control that allowed it all to happen, because the truth does not come in parts and neither should justice.