Clodagh Finn: Redress schemes show that State values property more than people
Mary Harney - Mother and Baby Home survivor - who was one of many who had been forced along a path that demands the kind of insistent tenacity that would wear down so many others. Photo: Fiona Sugrue-Ward
When the details of the updated mica redress scheme were first announced a few weeks ago, I was struck to hear Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien speak with such empathy for the people affected.
He spoke of “the torrid time” they had while facing the unimaginable stress of living in crumbling homes. Then he said, not once but twice, that the Government was committed to helping its own citizens rebuild their lives. He was at pains to make that point.
Speaking on This Week on RTE Radio 1, he said the single, biggest intervention by the State – a €2.3bn scheme to repair and rebuild some 7,500 homes – was designed “to help our citizens, who need our help to get their homes rebuilt and to get their lives rebuilt”.
When pressed on the detail, he returned again to the point that the suffering of the State’s citizens could not “just be moved on from”.
The Mica Action Group later raised the “devil" in that detail, warning that some people would still be out of pocket by tens of thousands of euro. The minister conceded there was still work to be done but when that was complete in February, homeowners would receive 100% redress.
It’s not for me to say if that provides a shard of light for the people who have had to deal with the corrosive stress of hearing their homes crack and disintegrate in the night. They are the only ones who can describe the hell they have been forced to live through because of faulty materials and a lack of regulation and oversight in the building industry.
However, the announcement of an €800m increase in a redress scheme, bringing it to an unprecedented €2.3bn, must seem like light at the end of a long tunnel.
Similarly, another group of long-time redress campaigners was given a glimmer of hope last week. But in stark contrast, the very starkest contrast, it did not come from government.
Instead, eight survivors of mother and baby institutions were forced to take their fight to the High Court. In the process, they risked the possibility of having to pay tens of thousands of euro in legal costs if they lost their case.
But the survivors, including Philomena Lee, Mary Harney, Mari Steed, Mary Isobelle Mullaney, Madeleine Bridget Marvier and others not identified publicly, did not lose. On Friday, the High Court found that they were denied fair procedures by the State’s Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation between 2015 and 2021.
The State admitted that the women were identifiable in the final report and that they should have been given a right to reply before it was published. It will also pay the women’s legal fees.
It was incredibly moving to hear Mary Harney speak on television afterwards. She said: “It’s been such a battle, but we’ve been totally vindicated, that’s the most important thing. This time our voices have been heard in terms of justice.”
She was wearing a T-shirt with a raised fist and the word ‘Resister’ written across it. Initially, I mistook the fist for a ‘P’ and thought it read ‘Persister’.
Either word provides an apt description of the scandalous truth: the people who have passed through Irish mother and baby institutions have been obliged to hold firm in the face of a series of steadfast obstacles.
They, along with the lawyers, campaigners and organisations such as the Clann Project who support them, have been forced along a path that demands the kind of insistent tenacity that would wear down so many others.
The €800m Mother and Baby Redress Scheme announced by Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman in the Dáil last month is not insignificant, but it excludes at least 24,000 of those affected.
It is interesting to compare it to the Mica Redress Scheme. Looking at both of them from this remove, a person would be forgiven for thinking that the State values property above people.
Why is the damage inflicted on a person, the corporeal house if you like, not put on a par with the damage done to bricks and mortar? Indeed, the total set aside for mother and baby institution survivors, some €800m, is the same as the amount added to the €2.3bn mica scheme.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not for a second suggesting that the people whose houses are crumbling around them should not be compensated. I’m simply putting the two schemes side by side – €2.3bn for 7,500 houses versus €800m for 34,000 people – and letting you draw your own conclusions.
And what of the 24,000 people ignored by the Mother and Baby Home Redress Scheme? Including them would have pushed the cost up to €1.6bn, the Government was told. That would mean setting aside €1.6bn for 58,000 people, as opposed to €2.3bn for 7,500 houses.
How the government funds those compensation schemes raises many more questions, but that is not the point here. The issue is simply this: how can our government get away with valuing the damage done to property above the unutterable damage inflicted on its own people?
The findings of the High Court will now be posted alongside the publication of the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes. That is welcome, but it fails to recognise that the redress scheme for survivors is based on a report that dismisses the experiences of those affected.
In the same way that the Housing Minister listened to the concerns of those affected by the mica scandal, Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman must listen to, and act on, the experiences of survivors.
As Philomena Lee, now 88, said last week: “The Commission’s findings are deeply hurtful and troubling to me. Those findings deny what we lived – they deny the truth.”
And any redress scheme must be based on the truth. For Philomena Lee, that truth involved being confined in Sean Ross Abbey and kept away from her son Anthony for all but one hour each day. When he was three-and-a-half, she was forced to sign a consent form for his adoption. The nuns refused to tell her what it said.
She worked, without pay, for six days a week at heavy laundry work, and she had no way out of the institution. When she and Anthony finally sought each other out, the nuns lied to them, and they prevented a meeting before Anthony died.
Those wrongs can never be righted with compensation, but a redress scheme that acknowledges what really happened would be a start. Instead, we have a scheme based on a report that overlooks the litany of human rights abuses outlined by the people best qualified to describe them – the survivors.
It is not too late. The Government can still take the kind of approach it did when drawing up the Mica Redress Scheme – reaching out to “our citizens who need our help” – and get its house in order with a complete review of the Mother and Baby Home Redress Scheme.
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