Outrage as government scraps independent review of mother and baby home testimonies

The government has announced that it will no longer be independently reviewing testimonies from the survivors of the mother and baby home scandal. 

In June 2021, the Minister for Children, Roderic O’Gorman, announced that he would be asking the Cabinet to appoint an international human rights expert to review the testimonies written to the Mother and Baby Homes Commission. Minister O’Gorman noted that he intended to have the report delivered this year.

This promise from the Minister arose as a result of survivors raising concerns over how their testimonies were handled. A member of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission, Professor Mary Daly, revealed that the 500 survivors’ deeply personal stories could no longer be counted as evidence, because they were not written under oath.

However, despite pleas for the survivors’ testimonies to be re-evaluated, a spokesperson for Minister O’Gorman confirmed to the Irish Examiner that plans for the proposed independent review have officially been scrapped.

A draft memo stating the intent to hire an international human rights’ expert was written up last June. However, the memo was never made official, and so the proposal failed to be brought to Cabinet.

A spokesperson for Minister O’Gorman recognised the anger and frustration that this decision has caused. "Although care was taken in the design of the confidential committee component to try and allow the truth as survivors wanted it told to emerge, the minister recognises that this has not happened for very many of them.”

"Having considered the matter, the minister believes that a new initiative to support survivors to tell their personal story, so that it can be formally recorded and accepted as part of the official record, provides the best opportunity for responding to the concerns of survivors in a meaningful way."

In the past, survivors have continuously expressed their outrage at the mistakes that have been made. "There would be no commission without survivors and that was very badly missed in this report,” said Teresa O’Sullivan, who was born in a mother and baby home. “Every time we tell our story, we have trauma and that needs to be very strongly recognised."

Historian Catherine Corless, who is responsible for uncovering the scandal, has also spoken of her frustration with the investigation. "This is going down in history and it’s a fallacy," she noted.

The spokesperson for Minister O’Gorman concluded that survivors will have a new chance to tell their stories when the planned National Centre for Research and Remembrance opens on the site of a former Magdalene laundry in Dublin.

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