Minister says memorials and legislation ‘constitute redress’ for thousands of mother and baby home survivors

Birth information and tracing, burial legislation and memorials “constitute redress” for the thousands of mother and baby home survivors who will not be entitled to financial redress under forthcoming legislation, Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has said.

Rejecting attempts by the Oireachtas committee on children to amend the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Bill 2022 and so provide redress to thousands excluded from its scope, he said redress was not only financial.

The Bill provides for redress to all mothers and babies who spent “not less than” six months in institutions, and not to those children who were “boarded out”. The Minister was asked repeatedly how the minimum time frame of six months was chosen. He did not answer but said a time-based approach to adjudicating entitlement to financial redress would be “less adversarial” than requiring survivors to provide evidence of harm.

Holly Cairns TD (Social Democrats) said she wanted to put on record her “utter frustration and disappointment” that members were told “only during lunchtime” that most of the amendments she submitted with Kathleen Funchion TD (Sinn Féin) had been ruled out of order by the standing order committee because of “financial implications”.

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Among the amendments they sought to have discussed were to include the 5,000 people who were boarded out, those who spent up to six months in homes and those who were used in illegal medical trials in the homes in the redress scheme. They wanted “systemic racism” within the homes addressed in the Bill, and removal of the requirement that recipients of redress waive all further legal actions.

“I think it’s important that we note this for the people watching and those that it impacts, that standing orders have done an incredible disservice to survivors and the Irish people today,” said Ms Cairns. “In reality the Minister would have disregarded all or most of those amendments but at least they would have been discussed ... Committee stage is supposed to be a chance to properly interrogate ideas and to formally and informally influence legislation.”

She and Ms Funchion supported an amendment tabled by Sean Sherlock TD (Labour) to require a report on the operation of the scheme be commenced six months after its establishment.

Mr O’Gorman said he was “not in a position to accept that part of amendment” as the Bill already provided for a review of the operation of how the scheme was operating under the terms of the legislation.

Ms Cairns said people wanted to know why those who were excluded from the scheme had not been deemed entitled to redress by the department.

“Birth information and tracing legislation is allowing people to access information they should have been able to access all along. It’s not a redress scheme,” she said.

“I don’t agree with you there,” replied the Minister. “The range of measures we are putting forward in the action plan do constitute redress. I think the measures we’re talking about in this piece of legislation here constitute a financial payment in terms of redress. But in terms of accessing information, in terms of literally seeking to deal with the really fundamental issues, and the different fundamental issues that survivors have identified over the years, I think that is redress. I think it represents part of the State making up for the multifaceted failures.”

Ms Cairns asked: “But could you just outline why people who have spent less than six months don’t get a payment?”

He replied: “In terms of the terms of the format for this particular scheme as you know we made a decision early on to base it on time spent in an institution.”

“Why?”

“Because we didn’t want to go for an adversarial system that had existed in the past that have been used in schemes in Ireland.”

“Why six months?”

“I point to the fact that more adversarial schemes ... relied on the provision of evidence.”

“Where did the six months come from?”

“In terms of addressing schemes such that relied on evidence being brought forward those sort of schemes have actually been replaced. The ‘stolen generation’ scheme in Australia originally used an evidence-based approach and it then moved to a time-based approach,” said the Minister.