Response to abuses must be decisive - Grace foster abuse and Tuam

THE decision by Finian McGrath, minister of state with responsibility for disabilities, to scrap the terms of reference for the inquiry into the case of the woman known as ‘Grace’ is indicative of a Government confused, bewildered and in disarray in attempting to deal comprehensively with historic and ongoing ill-treatment of our most vulnerable citizens.

The decision comes within days of those terms being agreed at Cabinet. Initially, the inquiry was to focus on what happened to the young woman with intellectual disabilities who was left in a foster home in the southeast for almost 20 years, despite sexual abuse allegations.

Now that investigation is to be widened after families of other residents of the foster home expressed concerns that their cases would not be examined properly by an inquiry with such a narrow focus. Fergus Finlay, CEO of the children’s charity Barnardos, was outraged, saying that, hurt and abused as she was, Grace was not alone.

In terms of abuse, neither were her fellow residents, as evidenced by the horrors inflicted on the ‘penitents’ forced into slavery by nuns in the Magdalene Laundries while many of their children were sold abroad to adoptive parents, with the profits going to the religious orders running those hideous establishments.

It is little wonder that these asylums established to house ‘fallen women’ came to the attention of the United Nations Committee Against Torture.

Survivors of those institutions may have taken some comfort from the Taoiseach’s powerful speech to the Dáil on Tuesday in response to confirmation that hundreds of dead babies were buried in a mass grave over decades at a mother and baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.

In reference to the Bon Secours Sisters who owned the Tuam establishment, Enda Kenny almost spat when he enunciated the word ‘nuns’ .

His anger was palpable but we have heard it before. We listened to such turbulence from the Taoiseach when he denounced the Magdalene Laundries and, more spectacularly, in the light of the Cloyne Report, when in 2011 he launched an unprecedented, uncompromising and withering attack on the Vatican for covering up child abuse in Ireland well into the new millennium.

Despite such passionate words, little appears to have changed in the rush by the Government to launch inquiry after inquiry.

Perhaps we need a commission to end all commissions — an over-arching Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address past wrongs and current failings.

We need the Government to join the dots and offer a coherent response to the historic and ongoing treatment of vulnerable people, whether it is babies in Tuam, the inmates of the Magdalene Laundries, victims of clerical or foster home abuse or the ill-treatment of whistleblowers.

Only by acknowledging the wrongs of the past and present can we hope to make things right for the future.