Mother and baby homes: State can't say how many redress applications it got for each institution
An FoI request from Kathleen Funchion MEP to the Department of Children, Disability, and Equality was refused. File picture
The Government has repeatedly failed to provide details to its special advocate for survivors of institutional abuse about how many mother and baby home residents have qualified for its redress scheme.
In response to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request, the Department of Children said it cannot provide a breakdown of how many people from each institution have qualified for a payment.
This is despite the department confirming to the that the data can be extracted from its system manually.
The mother and baby institutions payment scheme opened for applications in March 2024.
Mothers who spent at least one night, or children who spent at least 180 days, in one of the 44 homes are eligible to apply for the scheme.
The payment scheme provides a general payment, a work-related payment for mothers, and a medical card, or a health-support payment for those outside the State.
Sinn Féin MEP Kathleen Funchion submitted a FoI request to the Department of Children, Disability, and Equality seeking information on how many people from each institution qualified for the payment.
The request was refused as “the record requested does not exist”.
However, the department noted that the “payment scheme executive office is currently working on obtaining this data” for an annual report on the scheme, which must be furnished to children’s minister Norma Foley by June 30.
Patricia Carey, the Government-appointed special advocate for institutional abuse, told the she has been seeking the same figures as Ms Funchion for nearly six months.
Ms Carey said: “Last October, in my role as special advocate, I asked the payments redress scheme to give me a list of each institution, with the estimated eligible numbers, the number for each institution who had made an application, and whether the application was successful or not.
“The reason I was seeking that was because the number of applications is so concerningly low. There are 34,000 potential eligible persons for this redress. There have been 7,000 applications.
“What I’ve been told by the department since October is that they can’t get those figures [of how many qualified].
“If we know that one or two institutions have had no or very, very low numbers, then you can target your advertising to people who were resident in those institutions.
“To date, the department has not given that to me.
“The State has established a redress scheme, and yet they can’t produce figures to say how many people have applied from each of the currently eligible institutions.
“It really undermines the whole scheme if they can’t produce basic, quantitative, factual information when they’re spending taxpayers’ money.”
Ms Carey said that, despite being the Government-appointed special advocate, she was also considering submitting an FoI request in a bid to get the data.
Ms Funchion said it is “unthinkable” that, two years into the scheme, there is still no clarity on how many people are entitled to redress: “Women and their children who were forced into these institutions deserve so much better.
A spokesperson for the Department of Children, Disability, and Equality confirmed there have been more than 7,100 applications to the scheme.
They said that organising the number of people who are eligible by institution “cannot be done automatically”, as the information is organised by case, and people may have been in multiple institutions: “A manual exercise is underway to gather statistics by institution in relation to the mother and baby institutions payment scheme, on foot of the request from the special advocate.”
- Louise Burne, Political Correspondent
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