Gerard P. Craughwell Condemns Magdalene Laundries, Calls for Seizure

Thank you. At the outset, Minister, I want to acknowledge my friend and colleague, Victor Boyan, to come into this house and to lay his private life before, not just the house, but before the country, to advocate for those he lived with and those he had lived experience of. He is, in my view, one of the great heroes of this entire tobacco. And then I acknowledge the ladies in the Visitor's Gallery who quietly advocated outside the gates of Leinster House in wet weather, cold weather, your bicycle outside the gate, your teddy bears on the wall, all of that. It brought the message home to us. Now, there's been some discussion on the religious institutions and yes, religious institutions were horrendous. But let's go back to my childhood where a girl found herself pregnant. The first thing was to bring her into a particular priest in a particular church in Galway and arrangements were made for her to go on holidays. And she went on holidays and many of those girls never came back. They were pregnant. My father, who was born in 1905, was as Victorian a man as you could find. And when it came to a girl being pregnant outside of wedlock, he would ask, what did she do that was unnatural? And I thought it was such a humane approach to take. I worked in the Magdalene laundries on the heaters for the washing machines. And I saw the girls that were there. Some of them were Down syndrome. Some of them were girls who had fallen pregnant. And some of them were girls who I understand were too good looking to leave them in society. It's shocking what we did. It's absolutely shocking. My mother, God rest her, a cousin of hers, sorry, a cousin of her mother's, a year after her husband died, found herself pregnant. Her father-in-law, hearing this, took her two sons and dropped them in letter frack and took the daughter and dropped her in an orphanage. He had her committed to a mental institution. And after the committal to the mental institution, she had the child. My grandmother went to visit her. And that same man came to my grandmother and said, nobody is ever to visit her again. Years later, I'm talking 70 years later, my mother is in Merlin Park in Galway in the hospital. And she hears a surname of a man. And she goes to the man and she goes, that's a very peculiar surname. Very odd. I have relations with that. The man becomes totally overwhelmed. He's been looking for his relations. It turns out he was the half brother. He was the child of that pregnancy. And after 70 years, he was reunited with one of his brothers and his sister. The youngest of the three that were originally put into care died in letter frack. And when you would ask his brother what happened, he said they bet him to death. Now, it is right what my colleague has said about the religious institutions. If they're not willing to pay up, we should seize what they have and force them to pay up. And forget about it. Constitutional rights can be set aside, as we saw during the financial crisis, when a state wants to do it. If a religious institution has assets that would pay for some of the damage that has been done, then it should be done. But I would also ask the question today, has any one man in this state ever come forward and said, I fathered one of those children? Does anybody know of a man who has turned around and said, I'm responsible for Mary, whatever her name is, or Julie, whatever her name is, being put into a Magdalene Laundrie or sent to Baspera House. And I deserted her. Having had my way with her, I deserted her and left her. I have never heard of one man to come forward. Yet, I lived in Salt Hill in Galway. I grew up in Salt Hill in Galway. And there are girls who found themselves pregnant, who went away. And the children, I know of some of them who have now a relationship with the child that they had. But I also know that none of the guys I hung around with ever came forward and said, I was the father of that child. In fact, they would use the entire resources of their family to deny fathering a child. So let's be honest about it. We can blame the church. We can blame anybody we want. But it was a societal issue. And when I grew up in Salt Hill in Galway, the great cry, we talk about, you know, it was the religious doing it. You know, it was them and nobody else knew anything. The great cry was, if you don't behave yourself, I'll send you to Letterfrack. They knew what was going on in Letterfrack. I worked in Letterfrack as well with my dad. I worked in the kitchens there. And I saw the young lads brought down from Dublin to the back end of Connemara to be flogged whenever it suited whoever was there. So it was a societal issue. I will say it because time has run out. Now, I will say this, Minister, 3,000 euros towards the cost of health care for people living outside the country is simply not good enough. There has to be a way in which people who have critical health or chronic health issues as a result of their treatment, where they can have ongoing support. And I would agree with Senator Boyan. Martin Fraser, our ambassador in London, has a particular draw, if you want, for those who were in institutional. And I have to compliment Martin. Wonderful man, what he's doing. So I'm out of time. Thank you.