Laws needed to ensure religious orders pay fair share to survivors of mother and baby homes

Plaque remembering the babies, women and girls on the Greenway between Rochestown and Blackrock near the walkway over the Southlink motorway at back Bessborough house in Cork. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Laws requiring religious authorities to pay their fair share to the survivors of mothers and baby homes are now urgently required, it has been claimed.

The Government has committed to a redress scheme following the publication of the final report of the Mother and Baby Home Commission.

However, the Labour party are concerned that there is no legal obligation on the Church in relation to redress and have also criticized the lack of urgency in drafting laws to allow survivors to access their personal records.

"Currently there is no legal basis for the State to insist churches or religious authorities will pay up," senator Ivana Bacik said.

She said the State had previously reached a "very disturbing" deal with religious authorities which provided them with indemnity in the case of those abused in industrial schools.

She called on the Church to acknowledge their "moral and ethical responsibility" by stepping forward to make their apology meaningful through proper redress in the case of mother and baby homes.

"We do need to look at how we can change the law and create a framework where there might be some new way of requiring payment," she said.

Ms Bacik also hit out at delays in legislation to allow survivors to access their personal records and claimed it shows the Government's "failure to listen" to the women.

Children's Minister Roderic O'Gorman this morning said that he hopes to have legislation around information and tracing before the Oireachtas towards the end of the year.

Ms Bacik said: "This is a real concern, the lack of a definitive timeline and the pushing out a date for the bringing forward legislation and information and tracing, it is a real concern.

"It does reflect an ongoing failure to hear the voices of survivors to hear the voices of women and of those who were born into mother and baby homes have been calling for so long for adequate and robust right to information legislation.

"This is something we've been engaged in for a long time, I've worked very closely with successive ministers and with the officials on this, it should be possible to bring forward legislation much more swiftly and I think that survivors are right to see any delay as being a failure to listen to them and a failure to put their voices first," she said.