Irish Examiner view: Mother and baby redress plan heaps further pain on survivors

The sheer sense of injustice provoked by the proposed exclusion of many survivors from the scheme shows that the Irish State continues to betray women to this day

Candles, childhood mementos, and tokens of lost children placed at a sculpture and remembrance plaque and inscription on the wall of the folly by the former Bessborough mother and baby home. Picture: Larry Cummins

The news that 40% of survivors of the mother and baby homes will be excluded from the proposed redress scheme has been met, unsurprisingly, with a withering response.

It can be fairly described as an appalling political misjudgement, and it is hardly a surprise that Opposition TDs were quick to warn the minister responsible, Roderic O’Gorman, that the scheme is likely to be challenged in court.

Technical issues with the legislation pale into insignificance next to the sheer sense of injustice provoked by the proposed exclusion, however. Court proceedings aren’t necessary to illustrate its fundamental unfairness.

There is a widespread acceptance that the treatment of women and children over the decades in mother and baby homes was one of the worst examples of the State’s abdication of its duty of care to its citizens, particularly the most vulnerable.

Those who were forced to endure the mother and baby homes as inmates were not just abandoned by the State. They were also exploited by the Church, and the latter institution has been notably slow in making financial contributions to redress schemes. That reluctance to face up to its responsibilities is at variance with the doctrines the Church espouses but consistent with its behaviour in running those homes.

One might have expected better from the State itself, but by proposing this scheme it is instead heaping further pain on people who were subjected to a litany of horrors to begin with.

Women in these homes were subjected to involuntary detention, forced labour, covert medical trials, and illegal adoption; it beggars belief that the State would seek to exclude almost half of those affected from a scheme making some attempt — decades later — at redress.

Next Monday marks Brigid’s Day, a bank holiday which celebrates a woman — the only such holiday in the Irish calendar. This week’s revelations, and the historical background to them, show that we have yet to truly acknowledge how many women were betrayed in Ireland over the years. And how many of them are still being betrayed.