Clodagh Finn: It’s a travesty to base redress on flawed mother and baby homes report 

The State has yet to acknowledge the scale and the lasting impact of incarcerating unmarried pregnant women and effectively effacing the traces that linked them to their children, writes Clodagh Finn.

Children's Minister Roderic O’Gorman publishes An Action Plan for Survivors and Former Residents of Mother and Baby and County Home Institutions last November. Picture: Maxwells

Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman has said rejecting the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes would have “huge consequences”, as if that were a bad thing.

Surely, that is exactly what we need right now — huge consequences for the myriad wrongs done to mothers and their children, not only in the decades of the last century, but as recently as yesterday when the minister brought a draft memo on redress to Cabinet.