Ceisteanna ar Pholasaí nó ar Reachtaíocht - Questions on Policy or Legislation
Dail Éireann — 2023-02-22
============================================================

Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I want to return to the issue of the mother and baby home redress scheme. As the Taoiseach is aware, I was adopted and I spent an uncertain amount of time in a mother and baby home. I am acutely aware that the vast majority of adoptions, where mother and child were separated, were a result of the stigma and pressure that was put by a frankly twisted morality of church and State about children being born outside wedlock or mothers becoming pregnant outside wedlock. How much time was spent in that regard, in terms of the primal wound of the separation - effectively, the forced separation - of mother and child, is not the issue. Even the most cursory understanding of human child psychological development tells us that the separation of mother and child at the earliest point is a trauma for that child and, indeed, for the mother. The Taoiseach has not responded to that point and he has not explained why the Government would have this arbitrary threshold of six months when it is self-evident that damage can be and was done to mother and child before six months.

---

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/2023-02-22/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:37+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-02-22