‘Listening’ is not the same as ‘hearing’ survivors of mother and baby homes
A pair of baby shoes with a massage hanging at the walls of the Mother and Baby home burial site in Tuam, Co Galway. Picture: Hany Marzouk
This Government is very fond of telling us that it is “listening” to survivors of mother and baby institutions. We are constantly told about how much it has done for them and will continue to do for them.
Listening and hearing, of course, are very different things.
Doublethink, as coined by George Orwell, is the act of simultaneously accepting two contradictory beliefs as correct. Irish governments tend to be good at it.
Even still, it was quite something this week to see Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman tell survivors, on the one hand, just how much the Government is “listening” and how much it has done for them while, at the same time, confirming it was abandoning a planned independent review of the commission that survivors had asked for.
Survivors, campaigners, and legal experts had called for an independent examination of the testimony given by hundreds of survivors to the Commission’s Confidential Committee after it emerged that the Commission had destroyed the audio recordings of hundreds of interviews with survivors without taking verbatim transcripts.
A member of the commission of investigation later admitted these testimonies had been given little or no weight in its final conclusions as they were provided in private and not under oath. The commission separately heard from a smaller number of people under oath.
This was clear from the fact that many of the principal findings around abuse, coercion, and consent of women to the adoption of their children were contradicted in the most vehement terms by survivors of the mother and baby institution system.
Many survivors said their testimony had been misrepresented and misquoted. Examples of this were revealed by this newspaper and in a searing piece by former head of special projects at the National Archives, Catriona Crowe in the Dublin Review.
The anger of survivors and the huge public outrage forced the Government to act.
Well, to announce something. On June 13 of last year, Children’s Minister Roderic O’Gorman revealed plans to bring a proposal to Cabinet to appoint an international human rights expert to re-examine the written testimony given to the commission.
We now know that a “draft memo” to appoint an international expert was drawn up by Mr O'Gorman the following day but did not progress any further.
In fact, it is never mentioned again for the remainder of 2021. It was shelved almost as soon as it was announced. No one told survivors.
Instead, survivors found out when it was revealed by the . It seems that “listening” to survivors doesn’t extend to telling them that the only planned investigation into how the Mother and Baby Homes Commission gathered their testimony is being abandoned.
Mr O’Gorman's defence of this decision is worth unpacking.
In a statement provided to this newspaper, he said that having “listened” to the “concerns and disappointment” of survivors, he was aware that the report of the Confidential Committee “did not live up to their expectations”.
However, he believes that a new initiative to support survivors to tell their “personal story” as part of the planned National Records and Memorial Centre (NRMC) so that it can be “formally recorded and accepted as part of the official record” is the best way forward. In a separate media interview, he said this had been one of the “key asks” of survivors.
The minister “listened” but, in the end, decided that another vehicle to record testimony is for the best.
In short, instead of the promised review of how the commission gathered and handled testimony, survivors are being asked — again — to give evidence to a department-led “initiative” that has explicitly labelled and underplayed their testimony as “personal stories”.
They have already provided testimony, at length, to the commission of inquiry. Indeed, to a commission of inquiry that was found by the High Court to have breached witnesses' statutory rights by failing to provide a draft copy of its final report prior to publication.
Mr O’Gorman has now said it is not possible to “change the commission report” and have testimonies appended to it.
However, as part of the State’s settlement with the eight survivors who went to the High Court, Minister O’Gorman agreed to publish the High Court declaration alongside the commission’s final report on the Government website and deposit it for permanent preservation in the Oireachtas Library alongside the commission’s report.
It also agreed to list online and in the Oireachtas Library all paragraphs in the commission’s report which the survivors' High Court actions claimed did not accurately reflect their testimony.
Why can’t the testimonies gathered by the Confidential Committee be fully transcribed and compared against the Confidential Committee report? Why can’t misrepresentations and inaccuracies be corrected? Is it not possible to have survivors have their testimonies included in the NRMC and also have the planned review? Survivors asked for an independent review and it is warranted.
There are significant issues with the final report of the commission that deserve to be examined.
When the inquiry was set up in 2015, two bodies were established to gather testimony from survivors — the Confidential Committee and the Investigative Committee.
The Confidential Committee heard from 550 survivors but had no judicial powers. The Investigative Committee, which had judicial powers, took testimony from just 64 survivors.
We know that the testimony given by women to the Confidential Committee directly contradicts many of the commission’s main findings due to the fact that it was given little evidential weight.
For example, the Commission found “no evidence” that women were forced to enter mother and baby institutions by church or State authorities; “no evidence” of the type of abuse that occurred in industrial schools; “ very little evidence” of physical abuse; “no evidence” that children were injured in vaccine trials; “no evidence” that women did not fully consent to the adoption of their children and “no evidence” of discrimination against mixed race or disabled children in adoption practices.
In its report, the Confidential Committee states that its terms of reference were to “produce a report of a general nature on the experiences of the single women and children”.
However, the terms of reference as set out in the Statutory Instrument that established the commission in 2015 state it was to “produce a report of a general nature on the experiences of the single women and children which the Commission may, to the extent it considers appropriate, rely upon to inform the investigations set out in Article 1”.
Curiously, this latter portion, stating that the commission could rely on the testimony to inform its investigations is omitted in the terms of reference outlined in the Confidential Committee report.
Legal sources have pointed out that the terms of reference show clearly that the Oireachtas did not intend that evidence given to the Confidential Committee would carry little or no weight when it came to producing the commission’s general findings.
Perhaps they found this testimony not to be useful. If so, an investigation would find out why.
An investigation would also give answers as to why so many survivors spoke to the Confidential Committee and so few to the Investigative Committee. As has been outlined by survivors and campaigners, the opportunity to testify before the investigative arm was not widely advertised.
Neither were witnesses informed that evidence given to the Confidential Committee would not influence the main findings of the report in any substantive fashion.
If the concern is that evidence given to the Confidential Committee was not given under oath, could this not have been addressed earlier and survivors directed to the investigative arm of the Commission?
These are just some of the issues that survivors want answers to. They are tired of being “listened” to. They want to be heard.
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