‘Cold’ Mother and Baby Homes redress scheme ‘aimed at reducing costs’

Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has been accused of persisting with a “cold, calculated” Mother and Baby Homes redress scheme that is “directed at reducing costs”.

The €800 million programme was brought to Cabinet this week and legislation to give effect to its provisions will come before the Dáil and Seanad later this month.

The measures provide financial redress to women and girls and their babies who spent more than six months in institutions.

But Independent TD Catherine Connolly said the Minister was excluding babies who were resident in homes for fewer than six months, as well as thousands of women who were “boarded out”.

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The Galway West TD also said Mr O’Gorman was ignoring scientific evidence and the United Nations Human Rights Committee which called on the Government to widen access to redress and remove all barriers to the scheme.

The Minister was ignoring the Ombudsman’s report of 2017 on the “debacle that was the Magdalene redress scheme,” she said.

Mr O’Gorman defended the redress plan and said he had broadened it to benefit 34,000 women whereas originally it would have been limited to 6,500 people.

The redress scheme aims to compensate survivors of Mother and Baby homes, run predominantly by Catholic nuns, where unmarried women and girls were sent to have babies.

Legislation arising out of the scheme has been the focus of controversy over the limits on its provisions.

The Minister told Ms Connolly there were two significant changes to the measures.

“We have banded the various payments so that an individual who was in an institution for five years and one month and another individual who was there for five years and 11 months will receive different payments in recognition of the longer time,” he said. “Importantly, absences from an institution of fewer than 180 days will be discounted, recognising that those absences were often due to illnesses as a result of the stay in that particular institution.”

“All an applicant needs to do is prove the amount of time spent in the institution,” Mr O’Gorman said. “There will be no calling in, no questioning and no re-traumatisation.”

He said his department had designed a scheme that provides payments quickly, given the advanced age of many survivors. “That is why we have gone with a scheme based on time spent within institutions.”

Ms Connolly said the Minister is failing to learn from the residential institutions redress scheme.

“On every level, there is an utter failure to learn,” she said. “What is horrible and unacceptable about all of this is that the Minister is persisting with a language of equality and justice that bears no connection to the scheme that he is proposing.”

Mr O’Gorman said he had “worked at all points to broaden it”. He pointed out that in the original recommendations from the commission on these homes, no one was to be included after 1974 and anyone who was accompanied in the institution would also be excluded.

Those recommendations would have applied to approximately 6,500 people but he had improved it to benefit 34,000 with enhanced medical cards for 19,000.