Opinion: Will it take a miracle on St Brigid's Day for the State to do the right thing on the Mother and Baby Home redress scheme?
THE FEAST OF Saint Brigid, one of Ireland’s patron saints and a significant female figure across both its Christian and pagan traditions, falls today, 1 February.
Ironically, the government will today attempt to pass the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Bill, 2022 through Report Stage in the Dáil. If enacted as drafted, people separated from their mother before the age of six months in a mother and baby institution will not be eligible for redress. This measure alone will exclude at least 24,000 impacted individuals.It signals the State’s complete failure to recognise the lifelong consequences of forced family separation and loss of identity as forms of abuse. Minister Roderic O’Gorman has offered no reasonable justification for such an arbitrary policy.
How can the government justify the scheme’s bizarre compartmentalisation of redress for the abuse endured by these people when they were children? ‘Deeply flawed’ report The Commission’s deeply flawed final report has been roundly criticised in the Irish courts by a total of eight judicial reviews but it seems that the government is still relying on it to produce deeply discriminatory and harmful policy.
Read Next Related Reads 'Four lives were ripped apart': Woman plans legal action over mother's exclusion from redress 'Five grand can't give me my son back': Mother and Baby Home survivors hit out at redress plans Government told to sue religious orders, or seize their assets, if they refuse to pay redressExpanding and extending the Bill along these lines is the bare minimum the State should offer to those who live daily with the legacy of so-called ‘historical’ abuse.
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