Departmental Bodies
Dail Éireann — 2023-02-21
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

Over many decades, tens of thousands of women and children were wronged by the church and the State in this country. The twisted morality of the church and State at the time forcibly separated mothers and children. The Government apologised and promised to bring in a redress scheme. However, as the Taoiseach will know from the many emails that have been sent to Deputies and Ministers, it then shockingly decided that people who had been in a mother and baby home for less than six months did not deserve redress. This was an absolutely arbitrary and illogical decision that gives no acknowledgement to the fact that the forcible separation of mothers and children, whether for one week, five weeks, six weeks, six months or two years, is a great and grievous wrong. Will the Taoiseach, at the last minute, amend this legislation to remove this arbitrary and unjust threshold and acknowledge the wrong done to all in mother and baby homes?

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-02-21/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:36+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-02-21