Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Bill 2022: From the Seanad

The Dáil went into Committee to consider amendments from the Seanad.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Amendments Nos. 1, 3 to 6, inclusive, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 57 to 59, inclusive, and 61 are related and will be discussed together.

Seanad amendment No. 1:

Section 2: In page 6, between lines 10 and 11, to insert the following:

" "concluding year" means—

(a) in respect of a relevant institution specified in column 2 of Part 1 of Schedule 1 at any reference number, the year specified in column 4 of that Part at that reference number, and

(b) in respect of a relevant institution specified in column 2 of Part 2 of Schedule 1 at any reference number, the year specified in column 3 of that Part at that reference number, and includes a concluding year inserted by regulations under subsection (1), or amended by regulations under subsection (3), of section 50;”.

Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (Deputy Roderic O'Gorman)

We have debated the institutional payments Bill extensively in both the Dáil and Seanad. It has undergone at least 30 hours of debate across both Houses. It is important that we get this legislation passed prior to the end of the term in order that we can enact this legislation and put in place the mechanisms so that survivors can make applications and draw down the payments and enhanced medical cards to which they are entitled under this legislation.

I will speak to the first group of amendments. These amendments are intended to clarify an issue that came to the attention of my Department necessitating changes to the Bill at a late stage in the Seanad. They are necessary purely in order to protect the scheme for its intended recipients. Before I outline these amendments for Deputies and speak to each individual amendment, as appropriate, I want to confirm that these amendments in no way affect the potential 34,000 eligible applicants or how the scheme will operate for them.

The amendments are being made to provide clarity now and for the future and to ensure that the Bill faithfully reflects the policy objectives of the scheme, which is to recognise time spent, harsh conditions, emotional abuse and all other forms of mistreatment, stigma and trauma experienced while resident in mother and baby and county home institutions.

Moving on to the issue that has come to light, it is known that women were admitted to county homes in the same circumstances as those who were admitted to mother and baby home institutions. The county home institutions were successors to workhouses and the conditions in these institutions were very poor. The women who spent time in county homes unfortunately experienced particularly dire conditions. It was the understanding of the interdepartmental group that developed the proposals for the mother and baby institution payment scheme that all county homes had closed by the early- to mid-1960s, with many of the locations shifting towards the care of the elderly and becoming nursing homes.

The commission's report noted that the practice of admitting unmarried women to county homes ceased in the early 1960s, with the number of unmarried women in these homes across the country being in the single digits by 1963. However, it has come to light that while many county homes did transition to provide services to older people in the 1960s, a number of them were co-located with county or district hospitals, which provided mainstream medical or surgical services, including mainstream maternity services. Notably, mainstream maternity services continued to be provided at these locations for many years and in some cases beyond the term of the commission's investigation, ceasing in 1998.

As Deputies will know, the scheme is currently constructed so that women are eligible for a general payment based on having been admitted to, and spending one night in, a mother and baby or county home institution. The Government took this approach as we wanted to acknowledge the particular stigma and trauma experienced by women as a result of being admitted to a mother and baby or county home institution. However, if there was any confusion regarding these co-located mainstream services, the requirement to be resident for only one night could have implications for the scheme, with a lack of clarity and a risk of access inadvertently becoming much broader than those that the scheme is intended to focus on, that being the survivors of a very difficult institutional experience.

To address this, it has been decided to make amendments to the Bill which fall into three parts, as follows: first, to amend Schedule 1 to the Bill to provide greater clarity in relation to the names of county home institutions; second, to further amend Schedule 1 to the Bill to provide a concluding year in respect of all institutions under the scheme, including county homes; and finally, amending the definition of relevant person in section 2 of the Bill to include references to the provision of shelter and maintenance to provide additional clarity on the purpose and main function of mother and baby and county home institutions. I will now look at each element in turn.

Schedule 1 of the Bill is, first, being amended to provide greater clarity in relation to the names of the county home institutions. Amendment No. 61 sets out the revised Schedule 1. In order to be eligible for the payment scheme, an applicant must have been resident in one of the listed mother and baby or county home institutions. The issue in question arises in circumstances where county homes or county or district hospitals were co-located on the same site, although, in most cases, separately and distinctly managed. These co-located sites apply to 15 of the 29 county homes which carry eligibility for the payment scheme. In all cases, the county home is within the remit of the scheme but the mainstream hospital is not. I propose to amendment Schedule 1 to the Bill by creating two distinct columns: the first column, column 2, referring to the county home institution; and the second, column 3, giving further information in relation to the other or later-known names for the institution. In some cases, this other known name also pertains to a county or district hospital. This amendment is a first step to ensuring the policy intention of the scheme is clear and protected. However, it will also provide clarity to applicants as in many cases institutions were renamed or given a religious name at a point in time and an applicant may not recognise the institution by this newer name depending on when the applicant spent time there. This more-detailed schedule will also address an error that was identified in relation to the Waterford county home, which was previously listed in the Bill as "St. John's Hospital, Dungarvan," but should have been named as "St. Joseph's".

Schedule 1 to the Bill is also being amended to provide a concluding year in respect of all institutions, including county homes. To supplement the additional clarity relating to names, I also propose to provide additional clarity pertaining to the timeframe in which these institutions operated as mother and baby and county home institutions. My Department is currently engaged in a detailed piece of work with regard to institutional records for the scheme in preparation for its opening. This exercise, in conjunction with the work previously undertaken by the Commission, has allowed my Department to develop an understanding of the last year that women or children were admitted to these institutions for reasons relating to this scheme. Based on this work, the Bill now includes a concluding year for each of the institutions concerned. Acknowledging that further information may become available on the institutions as work regarding institutional records continues, there is a facility to amend any of the concluding years by regulation if necessary. I will speak further to this amendment shortly.

While the issue that has arisen relates to county home institutions, there are similar implications for the mother and baby home institutions under the scheme that are included in Schedule 1. The commission's term of investigation was 1922 until 1998 and as part of its terms of reference, the commission was given the authority to amend the relevant period in respect of any component part or institution it was considered appropriate to do so. In some cases, where the commission's report indicates that an institute closed or ceased to operate as a mother and baby home, this year is set as the concluding year in the revised Schedule. Some institutions continued to operate beyond the period of investigation, either in a different capacity or operating a model that was vastly different to that of earlier decades. For example, Miss Carr's is still in operation today working with families and providing a range of parenting supports. Similarly, the Regina Coeli Hostel also remains in operation today providing services as a homeless women's hostel. Therefore, in these cases, the concluding year is set at 1998, the final year of the commission's investigation.

To support these changes to Schedule 1 under amendment No. 61, there will be a number of necessary consequential amendments. Amendment No. 1 inserts a definition for concluding year in respect of a relevant institution in section 2. Amendment No. 3 is a technical one, which amends the definition of a relevant institution to specify that this is an institution which is named in column 2 of Part 1 or column 2 of Part 2 of Schedule 1. One will see that in the revised Schedule 1, Part 1 contains four columns with column 2 listing the names of the institution for the purposes of this scheme, that is, the county home. Column 2 of Part 1 contains information on another name the county home may have been referred to but, as I have just mentioned, this name may also pertain to a county or district hospital. Therefore, it is important that the definition of "relevant institution" makes reference to column 2 only in Part 1, with column 3 intended to provide supporting information.

Part 2 of the revised schedule will contain three columns but only column 2 referring to institutional names. Amendments Nos. 11, 12 and 22 are consequential technical amendments to sections 18 and 24 and provide for these sections to be amended to make reference to column 2 specifically when referring to institutions in the schedule.

Amendment No. 23 provides that in circumstances where an applicant was admitted to an institution up to and including 31 December of the concluding year, the applicant's eligibility for the scheme will be calculated on the applicant's entire period of residence, even if that goes beyond the cut-off year in question. For example, if a person was admitted to an institution on 20 November 1960 and was a resident in that institution for a 12-month period and the concluding year for that institution is 1960, the scheme administrator will base the applicant's award on the full 12 months the applicant was resident in that institution even though it goes beyond the concluding year.

The final consequential amendment arising from the revised Schedule 2 relates to section 50 of the Bill on additional institutions. Amendments Nos. 15, 17, 18 and 57 to 59, inclusive, all concern this aspect.

I will first speak on amendments Nos. 57 to 59, inclusive. This section of the Bill is being renamed to more accurately cover the provisions which will now be contained within it. Amendment No. 57 and the first part of amendment No. 59 provide that where the Minister, with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, is adding an additional institution to the Bill - that was something we added as an amendment in the Dáil - there will also be a concluding year added along with that additional institution.

Amendment No. 59 provides for a small change to section 51 and the language in the criteria which will be used to establish if an additional institution should be added to the scheme. It replaces the word "maternity" in this subsection with the term "pregnancy related". This change is being made purely to avoid confusion where the word "maternity" is used elsewhere in the Bill to describe mainstream maternity services.

The final part of amendment No. 58 provides that the Minister, with the consent of the Minister for Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, can positively amend the concluding year of any institution to a more recent year for existing institutions under the scheme if evidence comes to light that it operated as a mother and baby or county home beyond the existing concluding year.

Amendments Nos. 15, 17 and 18 amend section 20 of the Bill, which deals with the treatment of further applications to the scheme when an institution is added. These amendments provide that a further application can now be made to the scheme where the Minister, under section 50, amends the concluding year for any of the institutions currently listed in Schedule 1. Similar to further applications where an institution is added to the scheme, the same rules will apply to a further application should a concluding year be amended ensuring the most favourable outcome for the applicant.

The final element of this suite of amendments covers the definition of a "relevant person" in the Bill. Amendment No. 4, to be read in conjunction with amendment No. 6, changes part (b) of the definition of a "relevant person", which is the part that pertains to mothers, to now include two parts. The first, which is currently in the Bill, refers to residents in the institution for reasons related to pregnancy and the birth and care of the child as a result of that pregnancy. The second new part relates to being resident in order to be provided with shelter and maintenance. This second part of the definition is being added in order to refer in the Bill to the particular purpose of these institutions as aligned with their specific purpose in the underlying legislative framework for county homes and to thereby distinguish between mother and baby or county home institutions and other general medical settings, including hospitals, in terms of the reason for being admitted, which was ultimately because the women in these circumstances had no alternative and nowhere else to go.

Before I move to explain this further, I would like to say I am cognisant of the language and I am aware that the word "shelter", in particular, implies a level of support and care that many survivors do not feel was in any way aligned with their particular experiences in these institutions. The reason that term is being used is that it is reflective of the regime and the old legislative framework, which we absolutely recognise was deeply flawed and unregulated. In the case of county homes, they provided for poor relief, general assistance or institutional assistance in these institutions across the decades from the early 1920s. Section 54 of the Health Act 1953, for example, provided for "institutional assistance".

This was defined in that legislation as "shelter and maintenance in a county home or similar institution" and was the legislative provision governing the maintenance of unmarried mothers and children in mother and baby and county home institutions. The term "shelter" is being used in the Bill purely to reflect the existing legislative framework from the 1940s and 1950s that governed county home institutions at that time.

Amendment No. 5 makes a change to subsection 2(2) of the Bill, which outlines what is required for a person to be considered to have been resident in an institution. As mentioned at the outset, in the case of mothers, only one night in an institution is required in order to be deemed eligible for the scheme. This amendment is required to clarify that the residence must also start prior to 31 December of the concluding year for the institution concerned.

This outlines the issue and the proposed amendments in this group. Before I pass it to the floor for debate, I again state that these amendments do not in any way impact on the eligibility of the 34,000 people this legislation has been designed to benefit. The purpose of these amendments is to provide clarity and to protect the existing and agreed policy intention and scope behind the scheme.

Deputy Kathleen Funchion

The Minister finished by saying that the amendments will not affect anybody who is eligible for the scheme, but I will ask about the reasoning behind the "concluding year" provision. I support some of the Seanad amendments, even though, as the Minister knows at this stage, I do not support the Bill because of the fact it excludes anyone who was resident for six months or less in these institutions. It also excludes people who were boarded out. To describe this as a missed opportunity is a bit of an understatement; it is just totally unfair and totally unequal. If, however, "concluding year" can be amended if it is found to be wrong, what is the reasoning for putting it in?

The Minister will understand that people who are going through this situation or have been dealing with this their whole lives, in general, have been continuously failed by the State and understandably do not have a huge amount of trust. When we see a table coming out, such as the one in the Bill, which includes a list of the names of institutions and the concluding year, the cynical part of me, to be very honest, asks what that is trying to prevent happening. If I think like that, I can certainly understand why people who have been in the institutions, or have had experience of those institutions or experience of the State's response to them to date, would feel like that. I want to get clarity on that.

As this is probably the last opportunity to do so, I again put on the record that the Bill is a missed opportunity. People who were resident in the institutions, regardless of timeframe, should be included. The boarded out should be included. The arbitrary six month cut-off has only served to create this hierarchy that is totally and utterly unfair. For people to think that because they were in an institution for six months they are somehow entitled to the payment, but if they were there for six months or less they are not entitled to it is cruel. I want to again put that on record, even though I have said it on several occasions at this stage. In particular, I do not fully grasp why "concluding year" has to be in the Bill, if it turns out it can be amended.

Deputy Holly Cairns

Amendment No. 1 is about inserting "concluding year" in respect of different residents of institutions from "hospital", but creates a cut-off point based on information that is incomplete. Senator Boylan highlighted better than any of us could how problematic this amendment is, but tonight marks the end of an incredibly disappointing and infuriating journey for tens of thousands of survivors of mother and baby homes. This redress scheme is flawed, callous, inhumane and discriminatory. Even at the last hour, there is an attempt to insert another amendment to further limit the number of people who will actually get any kind of redress. That is coming from a position of 40% of survivors being excluded, while two thirds will be denied healthcare, 24,000 people will be ineligible for any compensation and many survivors will receive only a token amount, despite their lifelong trauma and suffering. I have to ask, following, as the Minister said, 30 hours of debate - for what? To come up with a scheme that excludes so many people so cruelly as that. Anyone who as a child spent less than six months in a mother and baby home will be excluded because somehow the Minister and the Department do not seem to acknowledge the trauma of infants who were snatched from the arms of their parents and kept separate for a lifetime. There has yet to be an explanation for how anybody ever came up with the six-month criterion.

The other amendments we will debate are largely technical. Any amendments we discuss following amendment No. 1 will be largely irrelevant to the legislation as a whole, and will be largely meaningless to people watching who will be affected by this legislation. They are irrelevant to the importance of the entire context of what we should be talking about. We are talking about some of the worst human rights violations imaginable, including suspicious deaths that were never investigated, forced labour, servitude, forced disappearances, torture, ill-treatment, discrimination based on sex, race, ethnicity and class, forced family separation, non-consensual medical trials, arbitrary detention, and interference with family life, private life and freedom of expression. Instead of taking into account these harrowing experiences, the Government scheme was solely about compensation based on the amount of time spent in a mother and baby or county home. This goes against the Government's own report, the OAK report, which found that redress should be based on several other things, in addition to, further down the list, time spent in an institution. Those who suffered horrific abuse while boarded out or placed in unvetted foster care will be entitled to nothing.

The amendment proposed by the Minister to insert "concluding year" in respect of all the relevant institutions serves only to narrow the scheme even further. It is a continuous trend of an insulting, miserly method for determining who qualifies for redress, creating hierarchies of victims and weighing unimaginable harm against unimaginable harm. I do not think there are any words to adequately describe how the State has failed survivors, but I assure the Government it will not be forgotten.

It is difficult for me and many people to imagine what it was like to be in one of those institutions and all that goes with that, including the lifelong trauma, suffering and all the different things those people carry with them throughout their whole lives. To think that finally, following the commission of investigation and all the different things that took years to come about and were very reluctantly carried out, there might be some acknowledgement, some recognition and some redress, the emotional rollercoaster that might be for somebody can be imagined. To be again rejected, slapped down and disregarded, and to find out that despite the fact you went through all that, and that we had a commission of investigation and there will be a redress scheme but you will get absolutely nothing - it is not possible for me to understand how difficult that is. It is not possible for any of us unless we were in one of those institutions. It is important to highlight how horrific it has been for people to go through that journey. For the people who are not getting redress, it would have been better if none of this happened. That, in itself, is an indictment of the Government's approach to this.

We debate a lot of issues in the Chamber. One can see how people might be coming from a different perspective and sometimes one can understand that, even if one disagrees. I feel that a lot but, on this issue, I do not understand where the Government is coming from. I do not even believe it thinks it is okay or fair to exclude people like this from a redress scheme. I know from people I have met over the years, through the committees chaired by Deputy Funchion and so on, that it is not only many people in the Chamber who recognise and understand how awful what they have been through is and that they deserve so much more, but the general public agree this scheme is not representative of what everybody else wants.

Deputy Sean Sherlock

I ask for some latitude for what I am about to say, because I will not be speaking strictly to the amendments. I seek some clarifications with respect to legislation at this juncture, with the permission of the Chair. I do not want to go over the arguments that we made on Second Stage and Committee Stage. The people who are watching these proceedings and who continue to monitor them will see the record of the House. They will parse and interpret the contributions that have been made by us on this side of the House. In that context, it seemed to me that the Government’s unwillingness to accept Opposition amendments on Committee Stage in the Dáil continued into the Seanad proceedings. We are, therefore, still left with quite a number of issues which have been articulated already. These are issues that have not been dealt with in the scheme, such as the six-month period, the role of pharmaceutical companies and the issues surrounding jurisprudence or litigation in respect of those people who sign up for the scheme. I feel strongly that these are issues that this State will be revisiting again. I make that humble prediction now.

I wish to speak on behalf of those people who are now, even though we have not completed the legislation, engaging with legal practices. They will have started to make queries with legal practices with respect to this scheme. In one particular case, a gentleman contacted me in the last number of days. He is approaching this with a great degree of trepidation and nervousness. He has engaged a solicitors’ practice albeit on a very nascent and tentative basis. He is unclear about what his pathway will be. That will become clearer as the days move on, but the point I am making here is that legal practices are already moving firmly into this space in relation to the scheme. This is in advance of the scheme being operational, as I understand it. Could the Minister in his reply clarify - and this is an obvious question, but I want to get it on the record of the House - if the scheme is operational? Second, what message can he give to those practices that are now inviting people who express an interest in taking part in the scheme to come to them? What does the Minister see as their roles and responsibilities at this point in time? I ask this because I have a piece of correspondence here from the person who contacted me who wants to engage with this scheme. He has not committed to a legal firm just yet, but he has made initial contact with one. That firm is asking him questions like, “Do you have any documents that prove you were resident in this institution?”; “If you were a child in this institution, how long did you reside there?”; and “Where were you sent to after your time here?”. There are further questions such as, “If you were a mother in this institution, how long did you reside in the institution/home and did you leave with your child?”; “If you were a mother in this institution/home did you work outside of the institution/home while you resided there?”; and “Have you suffered from any psychiatric injuries or substance abuse problems since your time in this institution/home?”.

I am now trying to put myself in the position of the person who was in an institution. It does not matter where. He was born in a place, and he now wants to engage with this scheme, but the fear of God is in him because these questions are being asked of him by a law firm. I fear that we are increasing the level of stress on these people because the pathways for people who want to apply are as of yet unclear. They do not know how to engage. When firms are already coming into this space, the question arises as to whether that is appropriate at this stage. I genuinely do not know the answer to that question. What should I advise that person to do? What advice should any of us in this House give to people who are now coming to us and want to engage with this scheme? It is not yet up and running because we have not concluded the legislation. What should they do? What advice can I give to this person? I am very fearful about giving this person the wrong advice. The Minister can bet his bottom dollar that we will be the interlocutors for a good number of those 24,000 people. That is self-evident. I am sure they will come to us for advice. I just want to be on a sure footing.

I refer to section 37 - I thank the Chair again for his latitude - which states:

The Scheme may, in accordance with regulations under section 38, provide financial support to applicants to facilitate their—

(a) seeking the assistance of a legal practitioner in providing an affidavit for the purposes of an application, and

(b) where relevant, availing of independent legal advice for the purpose of their decision to accept or reject an offer under Part 3.

In my conversations so far with that gentleman, he has asked me if his legal costs will be covered if he engages with this law firm at this juncture. He has asked if there will be financial assistance for that process or if he will potentially be paying that legal firm a portion of whatever award he may receive. To me - and I am sorry for revisiting that section again - the section is still not clear enough for the very many thousands of people who will start to engage with people like us and legal practitioners on this issue. There needs to be more clarity on that. That will be my first interaction on this debate and I thank the Chair for his latitude.

Deputy Catherine Connolly

I notice that a group of amendments have been taken together. Amendment No. 1 is in relation to conclusion dates, so I have no idea why that is there. Deputy Funchion has asked that question, and I will repeat it.

First, I want to thank the Department for its work. When I attended the Irish-language committee today, I realised that there is an extraordinary number of vacancies in the Department and there is huge pressure on the Department. I will not repeat the figure, which I think was more than 100. The Minister may feel free to tell me the number of vacancies in the Department. The staff are working under extraordinary pressure. Let me say that at the outset.

A question has been asked in respect of Seanad amendment No. 1. When Senator Boyhan clearly pointed out the problems in that regard, the Minister's response was to say, "He has put it on my radar". I do not know what that means in legal terms. We are here to finalise a Bill, and it is on the Minister’s radar that the institution where Senator Boyhan spent time - indeed, where he was born - was open for much longer than the Bill suggests. Senator Boyhan said he was born there in 1961, whereas the concluding year has been listed as 1935. That was discussed in the Seanad in far more detail than I am prepared to discuss here. I have no idea what the Minister’s answer to that was, other than to say it is on his radar.

I do not wish to be personal towards the Minister in any way, but from day one this has been a cost-containment exercise from start to finish. The best thing that the Minister can say here and publicly is that he is doing better than what the commission recommended. Yet, that is a commission that has been utterly discredited by any right, reasonable-thinking person. This is a commission that produced a report that has an appendix attached to it, which I will come back to. It is in the Oireachtas Library. The Minister’s best claim there is that he is doing better than that and he is doing better than the interdepartmental committee. I do not find that to be warm praise. After what we have been through in this country, what residents of former institutions have been through, and the various apologies we have gotten for what spanned two centuries, was it not time to get it right? We have had ample warnings about how to get it right. The Ombudsman pointed out to us how to get it right when he referred to the malfunctioning or maladministration of the Magdalen and Caranua schemes.

I have said all of this before and I have to get my energy to say it. I am not saying it for me but for those who are coming to us. The staff in the offices, in consultation with me, had to answer hundreds, if not thousands, of emails. Over and over, a sense of despair and frustration came across. Only recently, this happened again in relation to the Department of Education and two years afterwards it came back with a gun to the head. That is the wrong type of imagery to use but there was a Zoom meeting on finalising the details of a scheme for enhanced medical cards and so on. The point I am making is that there was a gap of two years and then the group of people affected was told there would be a Zoom meeting and a decision had to be made. Then they found out that the decision had been made already.

I would love to say that this is marvellous work, that the Bill is based on evidence and human rights and that we have listened to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. I wish I could say that because that is the way we should be going and I am sure, in his heart, that is the way the Minister wants to go as well. That is not what is coming across in this Bill, however. Let us look at it. The motivation continues to be to seek to exclude as many people as possible. The Government is excluding more people than it is including and the Minister is telling us this is a great Bill. We are excluding all those under six months, which is an arbitrary decision. If my memory serves me right, over 30 therapists put their names to a letter to the Minister saying this exclusion is arbitrary, wrong and not based on psychological evidence. That advice on the six-month period was ignored completely.

I can only stay with the conclusion I have formed because I have not seen any other evidence that would help me change my mind that this is a cost containment exercise. Tonight, the first amendment is a cost containment exercise and there is no justification for it. The Minister is telling us the information came to him recently but we have no idea how it came. We have had the Magdalen inquiry, the main institution for the industrial schools, the Caranua scheme and the interdepartmental committee that looked at the Magdalen laundries. The Departments have all of the information. It is a David and Goliath set-up all of the time. The Government has the information and suddenly there is certain information at the end of this process that the Minister is telling us is now leading the Government to distinguish a mother and baby home from a hospital or county home on the basis that the mother just went in there, had the baby and was not getting shelter. I heard the Minister explain the reason for the terminology and I accept to a certain extent that the Minister is caught with that terminology.

I ask the Minister to listen. We are not going to listen to the mother who went into home in whatever manner she was put in there. According to the commission, these women walked in and loved every minute of it. That is what the commission said; it said there was no coercion or anything. We are going to exclude those people. If they spent two days there and their evidence is that it caused psychological trauma, surely we can look at that? Surely this scheme is flexible enough to look at that? We are talking about a finite number of people. The first amendment is about an exclusion and a conclusion date, and it goes on then to refer to the relevant person and the institution. The amendments all continue to seek to exclude, and on what basis? We are going to talk about a surplus of €10 billion, €12 billion or €15 billion this year and going into next year. Surely we could have used some of that to make the scheme stand up based on human rights.

This scheme will be brought to the courts. The Minister cannot stand over a scheme that has an arbitrary cut-off of six months, whatever about standing over excluding all those who were boarded out, which the commission, in its wisdom, had to acknowledge was terrible for them. It was cruelty, not to mention those children who came from a mixed race background. They were totally excluded and that was all done to contain cost. An interdepartmental committee let this and its sole purpose was to contain cost. The Minister then went a little further than that.

The Minister has not given us any update on the negotiations with the religious orders, led by Sheila Nunan, on their contributions to the scheme. Is there any chance of giving us an update on that? I am from Galway city. In my time as a councillor, which is a long time ago, we begged the religious orders to give Lenaboy Castle, a former industrial school, as a gift to the council. They refused but subsequently had to give it as part of the redress scheme. I know what happened on every level, personally and professionally. It was packaged and sold on the local radio by the nuns and the local arts group as a gift when it was part of the redress to make up for what happened to children in that school. The industrial school in Galway city has been sitting empty since 2009, officially since 2011. Imagine what that says to those who attended. Every single year, a small group come from England and from throughout Ireland to visit the grotto, not for any religious reasons but because it was the one place where there was sunshine in May, flowers and a certain life and beauty. They go back to that every year, and they are left begging that this be preserved, while the building stands empty.

I welcome the excavation of the Tuam site, which has been approved. However, it is only one site and there is no certainty about all of the other sites. There are 798 children down in chambers that were variously described as sewage chambers and empty chambers. The commission managed to ask a question and make a statement on how the children could have been buried like that and how that happened. Mind you, it did not manage to answer those questions.

The commission made a weak recommendation that the Government write to the religious organisations and ask them to preserve and protect the records they have. That simple and mild recommendation has not been acted on. Maybe the Minister will tell me I am wrong. I like to be told I am wrong and I like to apologise but I have no evidence that I am wrong. What I have is a letter, and again we get worn out. Mind you, we are paid a decent salary and it is a privilege but one gets worn out by continuously following up on items like this which should not need a follow-up. The commission made a basic recommendation that the records be preserved, minded and made available. Nothing has happened with that recommendation or with any compensation or money from the nuns, brothers and priests. There has been nothing. An Taoiseach responded to me on 27 June with a two-page letter, in which he told me that nothing has happened, although he did not quite put it like that. He stated:

I understand that the National Archives is also embarking on a process to identify the list of organisations/institutions holding relevant records not subject to the National Archives Act and in the ownership, or custody, of private/religious institutions and/or individuals.

The commission was set up in February 2015, following many other entities before that. It is now 2023 and we have done nothing about the records that are being held by the religious institutions. I received a line telling me now, in the 21st century, that "the National Archives is ... embarking on a process". I am not told that the Government is embarking on it or has written.

Then we have the misquoting of the OAK research. An independent company was employed to go out and communicate and it was then misquoted continuously. The Minister has done so, as have Ministers of State. The big theme and feedback there was that survivors wanted access to their records. That is not a correct interpretation of the research carried out by OAK and the feedback from the survivors. When I reread it, as I did on more than one occasion, the feedback was that we should have an inclusive redress scheme, and that substantial numbers of people should not be excluded in the manner the Government has done. That has never been quoted by the Minister. It is self-serving to say it was only their records.

I cannot repeat that often enough. At the moment, we are looking at an RTÉ debacle. With every single minute of RTÉ's time and all the media taken up with it, there is no time to analyse a scheme that has been faulty from scratch. The ICCL has highlighted that over 40% of survivors are being excluded, and that the scheme is based on a report by the commission that is flawed. It has said it is "concerned that the Redress Scheme is therefore based on a report which the State itself agreed was flawed." How did the State agree it was flawed? Following a court case, it was agreed that an appendix would be added to the report. According to the ICCL, "The Final Report omitted survivors’ testimony and drew conclusions that do not align with survivors’ testimony." It goes on to give examples of that. The commission's report contained a caveat regarding "the contamination of some evidence" of those who came forward, the survivors. How can we stand over describing the evidence of people who came forward, with all the pain that entailed, as contaminated? It was described as contaminated because they talked to each other. Yet, the evidence of those who came forward from the religious orders and other backgrounds was given a premium, even though in one of the interim reports it was stated that it was not reliable. I have quoted that in the past. That was completely ignored. The ICCL has also stated that there is a problem with the work-related payment and that it is inadequate. Its briefing mentions the failure to deal with the waiver that is still contained in the legislation, and so on.

I am going to finish on this amendment by saying it is too late to appeal to the Minister to withdraw it. It is important, for the record, to use our voice to say we believe those who came forward. I believe, and I have seen with my own eyes on many different levels, and I have had that privilege in life. I have known of nobody who has come forward to speak without being pushed and pushed to do so. People who are so traumatised rarely talk. I had the privilege of representing people in Dublin at the redress board. Their lives were summarised in two paragraphs, after spending a lifetime in an industrial school. They came forward to that commission to tell their stories. I pay tribute to the work that went into many of the chapters in the document, which is 3,000 pages in length, but the narrative in the executive summary and the conclusion was nothing short of disgraceful.

It is my last chance to mention what the executive summary took great care to put an emphasis on, namely, the internal memos within whatever Department it was. At this stage, I have lost track. A few of the pages of the document were used to say that various Deputies and members of the media waived these memos but there was no evidence. They absolutely decried those memos. I am going to quote, for the record, a document which is very important. When you bring in a redress scheme, you must look at basing it on fundamental human rights and basic principles of justice based on maximum information. That is not what happened here. Information was drip-fed bit by bit. As the Minister is doing today, information has come to our attention just now in relation to various institutions, and when they stopped and when they did not. For the purposes of the two wise women and the wise man who put their name to the commission and took great trouble to discredit what various Deputies and members of the media said, I will refer to it now. It is a memo dated 12 October 2012, that is among other briefing papers, from the consultant public health physician to the assistant national director of the HSE medical intelligence unit. We left intelligence behind a long time ago.

It came up in the context of the inquiry into Magdalen laundries. They were not looking at mother and baby homes, but in the context of their inquiry into Magdalen laundries various pieces of information emerged, which the Government still has and yet we have no idea about them. Luckily, I have a copy of this document in my hand. It states that during the ongoing examination of the relationship between the Magdalen laundries and the historical health services of the State, a number of issues of concern arose at two of the mother and baby homes, one in Tuam in Galway and the other in Bessborough in Cork. Of course, the mother and baby homes were not included in the remit of the inquiry into the Magdalen laundries, but so serious was the issue that a strictly confidential briefing paper was produced. It stated:

Records for the Bessboro Mother and Baby Home go back to 1922, and contain a wealth of information about mothers and their infants. One area of concern noted was the Home's practice to record more than one date of discharge for each resident. The first date is the date that mother was geographically discharged from Bessboro; the second date is when she was "removed from the books", a period that might span several years.

The Government has this detailed memo. All I have is the copy of it that was given to us in the corridor outside the Chamber. The document subsequently states:

The culture of "protracted detainment" at Bessboro referred to the fact that mothers and babies were often kept long after their babies were born and they should have been fit for discharge. There is also evidence that women were detained, if not against their will, certainly under strong coercive elements, including a lack of questioning of the religious orders that ran the system.

Would the Minister not ask why this was not looked at by the commission or why it was looked at it and dismissed? Would he not ask why a few pages in the very important executive summary were given over to dismissing these memos, not looking at them and not questioning them? Somebody as high as the consultant public health physician took the trouble to write this memo. How many more memos are there? What information do we not have?

I will finish on my own city and county, and the Tuam mother and baby home, on which the memo states:

The Mother and Baby Home in Tuam was similarly involved with the provision of babies to the American Adoptive market. There are letters from senior Church authorities asking for babies to be identified for the American adoptive market.

The records relating to Tuam are detailed and extensive [I wonder where they are], and will require time to comb through, but certainly there were one or two areas of deep concern that will need to be looked at in more detail. As mentioned above, there are letters from bishops and senior Church officials who have written to the Home asking for babies to be made available for adoption.

The memo concluded with the following: "In both of these cases, there were issues of concern in relation to historic patient safety, medical care, accounting irregularities, and possible interference with birth and death certification which requires further investigation."

I mention all of that because I recall that we invited an expert from Northern Ireland to look at the adoption records. I am on record as asking the Minister to correct me, but as I understand it, she asked for her name to be taken off the report because she was unhappy with the changes. When I spoke previously on this issue I said the exact same thing and nobody, including the Minister, has corrected me. First of all, she asked for her name to be removed, which it was not. Secondly, that report has never been discussed in the Dáil. Records were changed and falsified or whatever. That was never discussed in the Dáil. I am looking at amendments today that are numbered, just as people were numbered in institutions. It is ironic that we are concluding the debate on numbers once again, with no change in the substance of legislation that really needed to be changed substantially. I will not be supporting the legislation. I acknowledge that many of the amendments are good amendments in the sense that they are technical, avoid further mistakes and provide clarity. I do acknowledge that.

Deputy Roderic O'Gorman

I thank the Deputies for their contributions. In terms of the reasoning for the introduction of a concluding year, as I described earlier and as many Deputies will know, county homes had multiple purposes from the 1920s. They succeeded the poorhouses into the 1930s and 1940s and by the 1960s, many of them had ceased. Some did not cease. Some developed into nursing homes provided for by the State and some developed into mainstream hospitals providing a whole range of mainstream services, including maternity services.

The scheme here was never intended to provide an ability to apply for a payment for somebody who gave birth in mainstream maternity services in a hospital that was the successor of a county home. As the definitions currently stand, that is a possibility. As I said, it was never the intention, and it is a possibility we have to mitigate against. That is what we are seeking to do in terms of the definitions and the addition of the concluding year.

In terms of the matter raised by Senator Boyhan, the commission found that St. Kevin's Institution and St. Patrick's on Navan Road were described as being the same institution within the context of these institutions. St. Kevin's Institution became St. Kevin's Hospital, and it went on to form part of St. James's Hospital. This information as regards the co-location has come to light in recent months. That is the reason for the changes being introduced in the Seanad. My officials met Senator Boyhan and in keeping with the other amendment we are bringing forward in terms of the ability to change a concluding date, if relevant evidence comes forward, we will continue with our engagements with him on whether there is a need to examine that particular date.

Much work has been done in terms of the dates that have been established for the concluding years. It is really important, however, and one thing I requested that my officials ensure was inserted in the Bill was that we have the capacity to amend the concluding year, not by bringing another Bill through the Dáil but through a statutory instrument, because new information throughout this whole process has come to light when records are found, and they identify new elements. Much work has been brought out in terms of identifying those concluding dates. However, we have put in a mechanism whereby if new information comes forward that casts doubt on some those concluding dates and bringing a concluding date forward would allow more people to be able to access the scheme, that capacity is provided for here.

While recognising what Deputy Sherlock discussed specifically in terms of the amendment, he raised important points for which I thank him. It is important to say this scheme is not operational right now and will be operational later this year. The legislation has not passed. We hope to have this legislation passed today and sent to the President. A detailed public information campaign will be issued once the legislation is operational. It will be undertaken here in Ireland and abroad. It will be done in plain English and there will be a clear indication of how people apply under this particular scheme.

There is no requirement to engage a solicitor to apply for this particular scheme. We would strongly encourage people not to engage with a solicitor in terms of this scheme. I cannot tell people to do that. I am always cautious about telling people when they should or should not engage with legal services, but our advice is that there is no need to do that at this stage.

As I said, there will be a comprehensive public awareness campaign in advance of the scheme opening. We are aware that a practice is taking place with some legal firms, and we will be communicating with anybody who reaches out to us directly and giving our recommendation that there is no need for engagement.

We also have a quarterly bulletin in which we provide an update to people who have signed up to this. Many hundreds of survivors and former residents have signed up to this update at the moment and we will make that clear in that update as well. We will use those mechanisms for communicating with former residents to let people know. As the Deputy knows, we are also in the process now of appointing a special advocate for survivors of institutional abuse. That person can also play a role in terms of giving advice that there is no need to engage with legal firms.

The legislation makes provision for financial support with legal advice in two situations, one of which is if someone needs to sign an affidavit because records are not available for them in the database that was developed by the commission. We expect that for the very significant majority of people who make an application, their dates of residence in an institution will be available within the database. We say to everybody that it is very unlikely that anyone has their own documents. The fact that someone does not have documents should in no way discount his or her ability to apply under this particular scheme. People should make the application. If it turns out there is a gap in information on an individual's particular case, there is the option under the legislation for someone to swear an affidavit. Financial support is provided for the legal process around swearing an affidavit. There is also a provision for some financial support at the end of the process if a person seeks legal advice before he or she signs the waiver and accepts his or her payment. Those are the two circumstances within the Bill where financial support is provided for anyone seeking legal advice. However, our strong view is that there is no requirement to engage with a solicitor to access the scheme. We will continue to work to amplify that particular message.

Deputy Connolly asked for an update on engagement with the religious congregations. Again, that is a negotiation, so I do not think it will serve the negotiation for me to provide a blow-by-blow account other than to say I have appointed Ms Sheila Nunan to take a lead role in terms of those negotiations and engagements with the religious congregations.

In terms of the Institutional Burials Act, as the Deputy said, Mr. Daniel McSweeney has now been appointed to head up the agency that will undertake the intervention in Tuam. Over recent weeks since his appointment, he has been engaging with families, survivors and former residents in the Tuam area. We made a decision that he would undertake that engagement before undertaking any sort of public engagement. I understand that in the next number of weeks, he probably will undertake a wider public engagement in terms of updating the progress of that particular process.

In terms of issues related to infant remains on other sites, in the last number of weeks, I gave approval for a small grant for a survivor group in Sean Ross to undertake ground truthing work outside of the identified infant cemetery in Sean Ross. They have concerns that the area enclosed, and the actual site of infant burials may be wider there. After some engagement with that organisation in Sean Ross, which I visited last summer, we are providing this support in terms of a piece of work they are doing.

Under the birth information and tracing legislation, more than 9,000 people now have applied for their records from institutions, and more than 5,000 people have received their records. Two key institutions, namely, the Adoption Authority Of Ireland and Tusla, are undertaking work to provide replies to all other applicants under the scheme. In that legislation, we introduced a provision that makes it an offence to destroy records. That offence is now on the Statute Book. Prior to the commission's report, my Department took on an archivist to make public documents related to the institutions that are held by other bodies. Particularly for the county homes, a large number of documents would be held by the HSE. The archivist is working in my Department to ensure that these can be transferred from the HSE under the normal provisions of the Birth Information and Tracing Act 2022. If the Deputy wishes, I can write to her separately to give her a more detailed update on that particular piece of work.

The Sean MacDermott Street plan is very important. This was raised with me very briefly after I became Minister in terms of something many people in this area saw as an important site where records can be stored, maintained and accessed by individual record holders and, to an extent, also by historians, as is appropriate under a legislative framework.

It would be run by the National Archives of Ireland in conjunction with the National Museum. We have the capacity to have a records centre but also a memorial site of conscience too. It would also bring some benefit to the north inner city with some social housing and children's services. That is an important step forward.

I think I have on three occasions answered the issue in respect of the report on illegal birth registrations in this House, Deputy Connolly. I respectfully say I have. The Deputy has raised it many times and I have always given the reason.

Deputy Catherine Connolly

I have raised only two issues. One is whether the woman asked for her name to be removed. The other issue relates to discussing it in the Dáil.

Deputy Roderic O'Gorman

She asked and I have confirmed this to the Deputy. With respect, I have at least twice. She asked for her name to be removed and we made the determination that this was work that she had taken on on behalf of the Government, which had been done, and which we believed should be published with her name. That was the situation. We have discussed that report. I am not sure if it was the subject of a full set of statements but I have spoken about the report. There were significant follow-ups to that report in the work the former special rapporteur, Conor O'Mahony, did. The central recommendation was that nothing more could be done in the space of illegal birth registrations. I did not accept that. I asked Professor O'Mahony to do a piece of work and he did a substantial piece of work. One of the provisions we put in the information and tracing legislation was to allow either Tusla or the Adoption Authority of Ireland, where they identify particular markers, which is a term Deputies will recall was used in that report for suspicious entries on a particular file, to investigate further. That provision is there and a team in Tusla is undertaking further work in that area.

Deputy Bríd Smith

Apologies for being late for the debate. I listened to the previous Deputies, all of whom spoke clearly on the issue. I am really coming here as an alternative to Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett, who is at another committee. I wish Deputy Boyd Barrett was here because, as we know, he was born in a mother and baby home. It is one of the many things that are excluded from this scheme with which the Minister has come up. I cannot say how utterly disgusted I am with what we are doing in this Dáil today. If it was not for the debacle in RTÉ being televised live and everybody in the country being glued to it at the moment, everybody in the country would and should be glued to this. What is happening here is absolutely outrageous. I find it hard to believe the Minister will stand over this. I think this will damage his political and personal reputation for a long time. He will be known as the Minister who carried this through. Unfortunately, that is the way the body politic and political life works. It will stick with the Minister. Unless he is prepared to say he is not pushing for this anymore and accepts the amendments or throws the whole thing out and starts from scratch, it will stick. Sometimes, when mud is flung, it sticks, and in this case, I am not sure why it would not.

I have not been watching this too closely in the past week or so. I realise the Minister is trying to include alternative names for institutions. Apparently, only those in mother and baby institutions could get redress and there was apparently co-location of hospitals and mother and baby institutions on the same sites. The Minister is including a concluding date, as sometimes mother and baby institutions migrated into ordinary county homes. He is including a new definition of "relevant person" to make sure that a woman who was in hospital rather than a mother and baby institution would be eligible. All of this would be fine if we could trust the nuns and religious institutions to keep proper records. How do we know what was really happening on co-located sites, whether the year they say the mother and baby institution closed is the actual date it closed, and about what is likely to have happened with the fluidity with which women were moved between institutions?

The concluding date brings another cut-off point which allows this Government and the religious institutions to pay the least amount of money possible under some kind of a redress scheme. It will see so many women and children left on the wrong side. If a county home and hospital are on the same site and there is much movement between the two, how does one know what is really going on? A Deputy mentioned Senator Victor Boyhan, who was born in one of the institutions named in the Bill. The concluding year for that is 1935. However, he was born in 1961. He knows other people who were born there in the 1960s. Names changed and people were moved from place to place. When one takes this into account, the more rules one makes, the fewer people will be eligible. Those who were hurt by the State and church will be left without redress.

To be honest, this is just more of the same. This Government has consistently had to be dragged kicking and screaming into providing redress for people, whether for CervicalCheck, institutional abuse, Magdalen laundries, or, now, the mother and baby homes. When the Government does provide redress, it often reneges on promises and tries to limit the amount it has to pay while at the same time protecting the church, its funds and its reputation. For years, it was believed that county homes stopped admitting unmarried pregnant women in the early 1960s. That was later changed and it is still changing. We cannot, in all fairness, put in concluding dates. The whole country has been outraged by the revelations of how people in mother and baby homes were treated, how these institutions operated, and how the whole State operated in collusion with the Catholic church, which was dominant at the time, but also other churches.

I want to make the obvious point that one of the things we have to do if we want to be a truly modern, progressive Ireland is to break that connection between church and State and have that separation. I assume this Bill will pass because the Government has the majority, so what we are doing tonight is cementing that relationship, firming it up and tying it down. It is so hurtful to many people.

I mentioned Deputy Boyd Barrett because he is a colleague and should have been here, speaking. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett was fortunate enough to be adopted by a loving, caring and well-off couple, who gave him a good living and education, and then later in life, he got to know, love and build a strong relationship with his birth mother. He was fortunate enough for that. With all of the exclusions the Minister is making for the very many people who were not fortunate enough to have all those ducks in a row in their lives, he is now insulting them, hurting them and pushing them back more and more. Either the Minister realises it or he does not, but he is looking at me as if I am talking nonsense and none of these things is happening. This hurt, this exclusion and long-term impact is actually happening to so many people who deserve all our love, attention and for us to put our arms around them. I mean us as people, politicians and a State who are responsible for what happened historically and who are able to change that for good and do something decent. We are doing quite the opposite. We will be opposing this Bill for sure but I wish, at the eleventh hour, the Minister would say he is walking away from this and will not be tarnished for the rest of his life as having the reputation of being the Minister who pushed this through.

Deputy Roderic O'Gorman

I will respond to the Deputy's point on the concluding year. To reaffirm what I said at the outset, this Bill is about keeping the original policy intention of this legislation, which is that 34,000 former residents of these institutions have a right to apply under this scheme. The changes that are being introduced will not reduce the number who may be able to apply under that original policy intent. If there are no records for a person's residence in a mother and baby home or county home institution, we have a provision built into the Bill, early in the process, that such persons can swear affidavit regarding their time in a particular institution.

Deputy Bríd Smith

What about false records?

Deputy Roderic O'Gorman

Again, if someone has an argument regarding what they believe the records say, the affidavit process will be there.

Substantial work has been done to identify those concluding dates but, recognising new information can come to light in this area where records are found, we have put in a provision that will allow for those concluding dates to be extended, and that can be done through secondary legislation if that relevant information comes to light. The concluding dates can be changed if it has been proved the institutions acted as county homes after those concluding dates.