Bríd Smith demands emergency action to save Mother and Baby archive

I want to congratulate Deputy Cronan on the very insightful summation that she's just made of the history of the counter-revolution that this state conducted nearly a hundred years ago, mainly against women, but against women and children ultimately. Just to, so the people who are listening are aware that the Commission on the Mother and Baby Homes five years ago was tasked with delivering an academic social history report. It interviewed over 500 people who lived or worked in the homes from 1922 to 1998, and over 70,000 women went through these homes. Now, this is not to personalise anything, but I just want to give a flavour of it. In the space of the party I belong to, People Before Profit, there's quite a sort of a flavour of what went on through our own elected reps. Richard Boyd Barrett was born in a mother and baby homes. Deirdre Wadding, a former councillor of ours in Wexford, had a child in Bespera in 1981, and she puts it herself, they were not the darkest days, but the darkest moments she remembers is when she used to have to go into the laundry room, and she felt the shadow of the generations of women who went before her. Gino O'Boyle, who's a councillor in Sligo for People Before Profit, lost his father at the age of 56, and his father, Shamey, had been a councillor there, had no access to his medical history. He was raised in Nazareth House, in that part of the country, and because he had no access to his medical history, he wasn't aware that he had a congenitive heart disease that would end his life early, and therefore, he believes that in a roundabout way, the deprivation of access to those records took his father away from him. And I say that, as I say, not to, you know, they're happy for their names to go on record, but really I'm saying it as a way of showing and saying to the minister, this is not a niche subject. It hits and touches to the heart of tens and hundreds of thousands of lives in this country, and not just the existing generation, but the generations that follow, and not just these people who actually went through the experience of either giving birth or growing up in a mother and baby home, but their children and their children afterwards, so it's extremely important, and I know you get that. I know you're on the right side of this, but I want to explore what I cannot understand about what's going on here. The first point I want to make is that we keep hearing that if we don't pass this act now, tomorrow, tomorrow night when we vote, then the archive assembled by the commission will be destroyed. This is an idea that seems to have entered your head, and indeed it's an idea that's deeply embedded in the Taoiseach's head, as he said it quite emphatically here yesterday. Is it the case that, like Mission Impossible, the archive will self-destruct after midnight on the 30th of October? How is that going to happen? But let's accept it's a fact, let's say it's going to be destroyed somehow, after the 30th of October, we don't pass this bill, that if and when the commission is dissolved and all the records are assembled and all the work that it did, what should we be doing here tonight? What should be the first priority of this house and of you as minister? I suggest that that priority would be not to accept that self-destruction of the archive is a fact, that the first thing you should do is to introduce an emergency measure, an amendment to whatsoever act, that makes this possible, to make sure that the commission's archive endures and is not destroyed. But to see, it gets curiouser and curiouser, because try as we might, we could find no reference in the 2004 Act that would confirm such a thing would happen. The 2004 Act states what should happen with the records deposited with the minister afterwards, and what is and isn't covered by data protection or freedom of information or national archives. Nowhere did we see a mention on the date of the commission that this state will have a group of civil servants surround a brazier and burn the archive or shred them. Could the minister please tell me where in law it says that it must be destroyed at midnight on the 30th of October? And if you can point that out to me, we should set about amending that act immediately. We're rushing through here, legislation's been repeated time and time again, and we have rushed through legislation on financial provisions quite recently, 300 pages long, that even one of the ministers speaking on the legislation said he didn't fully understand. We've rushed through the bank bailout overnight. We've rushed through legislations for deadlines on laws and regulations in matters of errors without really knowing what their implication would be. But we cannot do the same thing here. But we don't seem to be able to prevent a law that seems to be somewhere on the statute books that will say that this must be destroyed. If you can prevent that, you'll be doing what I said earlier on, hundreds of thousands of people and their families for the future and the past, a huge failure. This is one of the most shameful episodes in our history, and the state has to stop it from being destroyed. I think the minister is genuine in his statements, but I'm frankly astonished that you believe that narrative. If that's what you're being told by top echelons of the civil servants, that once the archive becomes your property and must be sealed, and if it's not sealed, then it's destroyed, please explain to this house, and more importantly to the Irish public, how that can happen. You would have to have lived on another planet not to understand why the survivors and their families are affected so badly by this and are so angry and outraged in the way that this has proceeded. And even if I do accept that you're genuine in your concern, we are dealing with people who have seen a different side of this state to what you have seen. And that is the side of the state that has washed its hands of the responsibility for the safety of children. They've seen a state collude in abuse, rape and torture of the most vulnerable women and their children. And they've seen a state watch over the malnutrition of children. They've seen a state collude in the selling of babies. They've seen a state that has absolved religious orders and church authorities of facing justice for past crimes. And I'm referring there in particular to the Woods deal that was done with Fianna Fáil to allow the redress deal, the disgraceful redress deal that was done with the Catholic Church. And so are you surprised when these same people and their families react to the news that the archive and the documents of history will be sealed for 30 years or face destruction? There's another question I want to answer you because I did appreciate your briefing yesterday and I did appreciate that you're putting some amendments that will go some way towards allowing people who honestly, in the case of Councillor Deirdre Wadding, did not sign up to privacy. She said quite deliberately she wanted her name on her story and many more like her who sat in a hotel with the then minister Catherine Sapone to reach a sort of a framework of how this commission would investigate things had indicated they want their names out in the public arena. But because they were handed some silly leaflet, I hand out leaflets all the time, as you might know, that's what agitators like me do. But that leaflet seems to have attached to it a huge amount of legal importance that I don't believe should be the case. And so you need to answer that question as well. So just beyond the secrecy issue and the question of privacy or secrecy, they seem to morph into each other in relation to this. I asked you yesterday what exactly will be sealed? And you said to me personal stories, the evidence and a huge amount of records that were collected by the commission, many of which you said are already accessible. I then asked you, are they all accessible? You know what you said to me? I don't know, deputy. If you don't know who the hell else is going to know. And if you are prepared to seal those records for 30 years without knowing exactly what's in them, then that is outrageous. You cannot do that. And if you're not going to be able to do it, then please come up with an amendment to any piece of legislation that says that the Civil Service can stand around a brazier and burn these files at midnight on the 30th of October. We can't tolerate it and you've got to do something about it. And just in response to Deputy Dowd, who made an offer that we're all in this together and we could all sit down and bang our heads together. That's what we do as legislators. And that's why we work on reading the legislation and coming up with amendments and having these arguments and trying to stop the rushing through of this bill like I did earlier on and like other deputies have done during the week. We're genuinely trying to stop you rushing this through, but the whole apparatus around you seems to be determined that it's rushed through. I'll remind Deputy O'Dowd that the party that he belongs to and the Fianna Fáil party, of which the Taoiseach was very adamant today that these records be destroyed if we don't seal them for 30 years. Both of those parties have overseen the legacy of this state in the last hundred years. They have dominated the running of this state, so they can't just wash their hands of it and say we're all in this together and let's come up with some universal solution. The universal solution is not to do this and the universal solution is to listen to the survivors. And I'll just finish by saying I would first of all say to you, Minister, that emergency measures that you need to introduce to stop the archive being sealed away or to stop it being destroyed. I just don't understand that notion. And an amendment of whatsoever you can come up with could be acceptable to us as long as the survivors, and many of them still are not surviving now, many of them have died since the report was published. And we do want to see it published when support was compiled. But you need to come up with a way of defending those people, allowing the public have access to everything. And you don't even know what the everything is that's going to be sealed. That is an outrageous element of this that I just cannot accept.