Holly Cairns (Cork South West, Social Democrats)
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400. To ask the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth the reason St Patrick's Guild, Temple Hill, Dublin, has been excluded from the mother and baby payment scheme. [23705/24]

Roderic O'Gorman (Dublin West, Green Party)
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The Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme is designed to provide payments and other benefits to people who spent time in one or more of the Mother and Baby or County Home Institutions, that were identified by the Commission of Investigation as having a main function of providing sheltered and supervised ante and post-natal facilities to single mothers and their children. The institutions covered by the Payment Scheme are set out in Schedule 1 to the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Act, which was signed into law on 11th July 2023.

St. Patrick’s Guild was an Adoption Society, with sites in Rathmines, Blackrock and elsewhere and, as such, is not an institution which fell within the terms of reference of the Commission of Investigation. The institution at Temple Hill, Blackrock, commonly known as St. Patrick’s Hospital, was not investigated by the Commission of Investigation because it operated primarily as a children's hospital rather than as an institution providing ante and post-natal facilities.

At page 29 in Chapter 2 of the Social History section of the Commission of Investigation report, which details the different types of institutions that existed, Temple Hill was listed as a children’s hospital and, as such, did not meet the criteria of a Mother and Baby Home - www.gov.ie/en/publication/89e43-chapter-2-institutions/. The Commission referred to the institution as being “frequently wrongly described as a mother and baby home. It was an infants’ nursery and mothers were not resident there. As a hospital, it received funding from the Hospitals Commission.”

For this reason it is not included in this Payment Scheme.