Clodagh Finn: Forget flip-flops, remember how we treated mother and baby home survivors

Shoes at Bessborough in Cork. The women who gave birth in mother and baby ‘homes’ in the last century were cast out by the State, Church, and society.

Here are some of my recent diary entries. 

One: RTÉ spent nearly €5,000 on party flip-flops.

Two: The minimum payment for women who spent time in mother and baby ‘homes’ is €5,000. That was agreed under the terms of the Mother and Baby Institutions Payments Scheme, which has just been signed into law.

Three: The flip-flops continue to make the headlines.

It’s true. We are not at all comparing like with like because the tens of thousands of people who passed through mother and baby institutions in the last century have never been treated with the kind of toadying respect given to corporate party-goers.

And those high up in RTÉ are not responsible for government policy, although they know how to make a fuss of people. Not so the Irish State which fought those affected every step of the way, every inch a battlefield.

Now, as the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Act passes into law, the government will surely blow its own trumpet and say it has succeeded in doing something all previous governments have failed to do; that is, introduce legislation to address a deep historic wrong.

To be fair, it has genuinely done something no other government has done. It has passed three pieces of legislation — an information bill, a burial bill, and a redress bill — and it has outlined an action plan with an impressive number of entries.

The only issue is that it has not, in any way, addressed the wrongs of the past. Part of the reason for that is that the voices of survivors, adoptees, restorative justice experts, health and legal professionals, the Children’s Committee, opposition politicians, and others were all ignored.

In some cases, their testimony was even erased, though temporarily as it transpired.

All the same, you can’t but draw the conclusion that these people — the ones who actually lived the experience — were left howling in the wind.

In all of this, the government has looked at the recent past through the narrowest of lens to avoid the financial cost of framing it as the series of human rights abuses it is. They might have saved money in the process, but the fallout is incalculable.

To feel like you belong to a country, the laws of that country must honour you as a full citizen. The terms ‘law’ and ‘legislation’ might seem remote and abstract, dressed-up as they often are in language that might have come from the circumlocution office. But the law is not at all abstract; it trickles down into the grain of daily life, shaping how we go about every aspect of our daily lives.

We talk about ‘enshrining’ something in law to protect and treasure it — an idea, a principle, or a right, for example.

In its attempt at redress, this government has passed a law that effectively says I am not to be trusted with my own name.

That is what it feels like to live in Ireland as an adopted person after the passage of the Birth Information and Tracing Bill. It contains a measure that obliges adoptees to be briefed on the nature of privacy if a parent has expressed a wish not to be contacted.

In other words, it is saying that adopted people are not entitled to their own name and birth records in all circumstances. They need to attend a mandatory information session on privacy before being given what is rightly theirs.

Yet, Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has labelled this “landmark” and “groundbreaking” legislation.

How it is “groundbreaking” to impose conditions on access to your own name? The law is saying very clearly — despite the puffed-up adjectives used by the Minister — that adopted people have fewer rights than other people.

Now, President Michael D Higgins has signed into law a redress scheme that excludes some 24,000-plus people. The horrors and mistreatment endured by those who were boarded out to sometimes abusive foster homes do not feature, although the government has been made aware of their experiences.

It has also excluded those subjected to illegal vaccine trials, those who suffered racism or other discrimination and all adopted children who spent less than six months in the ‘homes’.

To be fair, opposition politicians spoke eloquently in both houses of the Oireachtas, pointing out the arbitrary nature of framing a redress scheme on the length of time women and their children spent in mother and baby institutions.

Less than three months yields a payment of €5,000, while women who spent more than 10 years incarcerated — because that is what it was — are entitled to the maximum payment of €125,000.

The figure €5,000 resonates oddly this week because the amount echoes that spent on flip-flops for a corporate party.

It is 'shameful' and 'damaging', to borrow words used to describe the hidden expenditure at the national broadcaster, RTÉ, that the two sums are so similar.

It is also shameful that this redress bill has been made law without even a fraction of the outrage that has greeted the RTÉ revelations.

The women who gave birth in mother and baby ‘homes’ in the last century were cast out by the State, Church, and society. That harsh triumvirate effectively rendered those women stateless because it swallowed up the social space they might have inhabited.

It’s up to you to decide which entity deserved most blame, but it’s generally agreed that all three combined forcefully to make women surrender their babies. And yet, the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes found no evidence of ‘forced family separation’.

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The sad fact is that Church, State, and society are doing it all over again. In May, a negotiator had to be appointed to try to force church leaders, religious congregations and lay Catholic organisations to face up to the systemic abuse inflicted over several decades. They have yet to even agree to pay a red cent in compensation, much less actually pay it.

The State has skimmed along the surface of the issue in an attempt to control the amount it has to pay out. In doing so, the women and children it purports to be helping have been demoted to second-class citizens. Again.

That leaves us, society. This time around, do we have the moral courage to hold the State and the Church to account?

Please don’t look back on July 2023 and remember flip-flops. Remember all the survivors of mother and baby institutions who have been cast out, once again.

Maybe you’ll remember that too when the government parties come looking for votes at the next election.