Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Bill 2022: Report Stage (Resumed) and Final Stage
Dail Éireann — 2023-02-22
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

I suspect that almost none of this adversarial approach - the Minister says he is trying to avoid it, but this amounts to an adversarial approach of putting pressure on the applicants to meet particular timeframes for further information - would be necessary if he did not have the arbitrary six-month exclusion. Why send someone back for more information? Why refuse his or her application? It would be because the deciding officer felt that the applicant had not reached the threshold of six months or needed to do something to prove he or she had. The fact that, from the start, the Government has been trying to exclude people for reasons the Minister still has not explained despite repeated requests means that we will end up in an adversarial approach where we require the survivors to get information and then deem their applications to be withdrawn if they do not revert within certain timeframes as against an open-ended period for the State to process and make decisions on applications.
This redress scheme and legislation were supposed to be about the survivors and redress and an acknowledgement of those who had suffered. Instead, those who went through the mother and baby homes, those who suffered forced separations and those who were done a great wrong by the church and State will be put under pressure to either provide information or to have their applications deemed withdrawn. Is that not perverse? Is that not completely upside down and the wrong way around? The State can take as long as it likes, but the applicant – the survivor – may be required to prove himself or herself according to these arbitrary, unjust, inhumane, insulting and exclusionary criteria that the Government has devised.

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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