I thank Deputy Cairns. We move to Solidarity-People Before Profit. Deputies Bríd Smith, Paul Murphy and Barry are sharing time.

I start by saluting the survivors, the women and their families who have put up with years of very deep pain. I also start by echoing the hurt and anger that they feel at this report. No doubt they will also feel some anger and hurt at the apology that they heard here today. I certainly do.

One could say that the report and its contents were to be expected. When the then Minister and current Senator McDowell introduced the original Act to set up commissions, it was very much about being a cheaper, easier, less justiciable version of tribunals and offered a way out of looking at these issues without risking criminal or legal implications. This report, therefore, cannot deliver real answers or address the scale of the crimes or offer any actual solutions. I find the built-in weakness of it shocking. It is shocking not in the facts and the testimonies, many of which were known or people had spoken about, but the constant refrain and single-minded determination to lay the core responsibility, from the State and religious institutions, on to society, fathers, families and on everyone. As Fionn Davenport, himself an adoptee, has said, if one makes everyone responsible then no one is responsible. That is just what the Taoiseach has done here today, as has the Tánaiste. They make us all responsible where, then, nobody is responsible. It is not true to say that we are all responsible and that the chief blame lies with fathers and families.

There was no vote on the attitude that society would have to unmarried mothers or to children born out of wedlock. The ethos and the social mores that the report takes as a natural given, as some sort of fixed entity, was hard worked for, planned and argued for by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and even the Labour Party at times, which were not innocent bystanders but enthusiastic enforcers of these mores. The Catholic and religious institutions fought for the attitudes and vigorously defended the rules and regulations that went with them. The church and State battered, beat and forced those mores on women and society in a deliberate, premeditated and political programme. It was known and was opposed.

The registrar general reported to this House in 1924 that the rate of death among illegitimate children was way higher than that of Northern Ireland, England and Wales. It is also stated in the record of this House in 1936 in a report from the Department of the then Minister for Local Government and Public Health, Seán T. O'Kelly of Fianna Fáil, in response to a similar report that: "Doubtless the great proportion of deaths in these cases is due to congenital debility, congenital malformation and other ante-natal causes traceable to the conditions associated with the unfortunate lot of the unmarried mother." The abuse and high mortality rates among these children was highlighted and opposed in this House. An Independent Deputy, Dr. Robert Rowlette, in response to Deputy Seán T. O'Kelly said: "I do not know of any evidence that will prove that there is greater general congenital debility or malformation in the illegitimate child than in the legitimate child." He went on to say: "It is a disgrace to a civilised country, and to a Christian country like this, that three-and-a-half times more illegitimates are condemned to death in the first year of their existence than legitimate children".

The idea that children had rights was part of a democratic programme articulated in the 1916 Proclamation and adopted by this State when we signed up to the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of the League of Nations in 1924. The problem here was not that society condoned it but that the political class and the church enforced it. That needs to be acknowledged first and foremost.

The most shocking and offensive matter in this report is, however, that there is no evidence of those abuses, of profit-making from adoptions, or of the coercion of women into signing adoption forms, other than the testimony of those women themselves. That is not dealt with as evidence other than the bones of over 9,000 dead babies' bodies.

I will finish by saying that a number of things have to happen. We have to treat immediately those graveyards around those homes as crime scenes. No more developments or alterations should happen to them and they should be blocked off as crime scenes because somewhere in the future we need to get to the bottom of this criminal matter. They are crime scenes and need to be treated as such. The process of redress also needs to start, not by offering these people enhanced medical cards, but by telling these institutions which have built their wealth on the bones of dead babies, that their assets will be effectively frozen unless they agree to deliver a decent redress that is an absolute benefit to both those women and to society in general.

This report is inadequate, should be rejected in its entirety and the apology of the Taoiseach is utterly inadequate.

This was the Ireland that was presided over by the men whose pictures hang on the walls of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste. It was the Ireland of Eamon de Valera, Seán Lemass, Jack Lynch and Charlie Haughey, and the Ireland of W. T. Cosgrave, John A. Costello, Liam Cosgrave, Garret FitzGerald and John Bruton. "What upset me is Micheál Martin blaming us - society," states Galway historian Catherine Corless. She is right to be upset. The Government's spin machine is emphasising the responsibility of the culture and the society. The spin machine is de-emphasising the responsibility of the church and the State, but who moulded the culture? Who moulded the society? The mother and baby homes were the product of a backward, reactionary, conservative society presided over by the State, the Civil War parties and the church. No amount of spinning can, or will, hide that fact. Today, in 2021, church and State still remain to be separated. One way to honour the survivors would be to completely separate church and State in this country now.

In 1943, 75% of all babies born at the Bessborough mother and baby home in Cork, or admitted to that place, died. Where are their bodies buried? More than 900 babies died at Bessborough. That number does not include the babies who were stillborn. Where are their bodies buried? Is there a danger that some of these babies will be buried now, in the 21st century, beneath apartment blocks? Recently, a planning application was submitted to Cork City Council to build 246 apartments at Bessborough. The developers have not engaged properly with survivors, adoptees and local residents, who say the burial sites must be fully identified before any building can even be considered. The survivors regard the developers' actions as adding insult to injury, all in the name of profit. This development must not be allowed to proceed.

I want to use my short time to amplify the voices of survivors of these hellish church–State institutions. Repeatedly in the report, their voices are denigrated. Despite harrowing survivor testimonies of abuse, the report states there was "very little evidence of physical abuse" of women, and it downplays the physical abuse of children. On forced adoptions, it essentially states the many woman who have testified that their children were forcibly taken from them are lying. It states:

Some of this cohort of women are of the opinion that their consent was not full, free and informed. However, ... there is no evidence that this was their view at the time of the adoption.

Contrast this with what the Irish First Mothers group says:

The massive abuse they suffered was the forced removal of their child. The Commission is blind to the most grievous injury which was the reason for the inquiry in the first place.

This most grievous injury has been entirely excluded from the very limited consideration of redress for survivors, only some of whom are to be compensated at all and then only for abuse and forced labour, not forced adoption. The Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors states "up to 15,000 people may have been illegally adopted by rogue adoption agencies who were allowed free reign back in the day and now have been given a free pass to escape their criminal behaviour". The Government and commission have essentially thrown them under a bus and walked away. They are correct that the commission's report whitewashes foreign and illegal adoptions, which should be the subject of a separate inquiry. Why did this happen? It was not because of some collective pathology on the part of society as a whole, as the establishment parties who oversaw it at the time would have us believe; it was because the ruling class in this country - the church, the State's officials, the establishment parties and their wealthy supporters — wanted to minimise their financial responsibility for what they saw as a surplus population of impoverished women and children. That is why they did not care about the thousands of deaths and the shockingly high mortality rates. Their only real concern then and now has been to limit the financial cost. Church and State might be forced to apologise but they still do not want to pay. We must ensure that this time, they do not get away with it. As Claire McGettrick of the Clann Project has said:

In 2013, once the Magdalene apology came, nobody (apart from ... [a few]) was interested in what an insult the McAleese Report was to the women's lived experiences. This time feels different - this time we have a movement.

Finally, the assets of the religious orders responsible should be seized. They should be used to compensate survivors for all the harm that they suffered. The church and State must be fully separated, and institutions such as the Bon Secours, which have devastated so many lives, should no longer have any role in healthcare or the education of children.