Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme Bill 2022: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2023-05-24
============================================================

Paul Gavan (SF), Labour Panel

It is all very well for the Minister to say there is a range of responses in the Bill. I acknowledge this. However, he still has not explained the exclusion of these 24,000 people. He did refer to the fact that in his experience of meeting these people, they were much more interested in birth information. I do not know if that gives the Minister the right to decide that he knows what is best for those people. Certainly, the thousands of people who have written to the public representatives of all parties objecting to this arbitrary 180-day rule deserve an answer. Again, then, I pose a very straightforward question to the Minister: how does he justify the exclusion of 24,000 people who spent less than six months in these institutions from any redress scheme? Again, I would appreciate it if he gave me a straight answer.

---

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/seanad/2023-05-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:56+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-05-24