The Government’s 12-18-month root and branch review of the gardaí will not be finalised until after Easter because further consultation with opposition parties is still needed.

Wicklow TD and Labour parliamentary vice-chair Anne Ferris’s party future was under threat since her decision two weeks ago — based on heartbreaking personal experience — to rebel against the Government’s redress scheme for women held in mother and baby homes.

Tens of thousands of people affected by the mother and baby homes scandal risk being excluded from a State investigation into the decades-long hidden crisis.

A woman has spoken publicly for the first time of how she was born in a mother and baby home and then visited the same place 17 years later after discovering she was pregnant.