Opening Remarks by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs on the Tuam Mother and Baby Home

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Thank you all for coming this evening. I want to start by speaking to you about the decisions I now have to make, how I hope to make them, and why I am here this evening.

Let me start with that last point.

Some of you may wonder why we are gathering this evening; surely, you may think, there is enough information for me to decide on what to recommend to Cabinet colleagues.

In essence, I am here because, as the person with responsibility for making this important recommendation, I want another chance to hear your perspectives and views.

I want also to outline for you where my thinking is on how we might now proceed, and how I came to that.

Of course you may want to challenge me, if you think it appropriate, in a constructive manner.

It is my hope that you will accept that I come here in good faith to find the best possible way forward in relation to the site of the former Mother and Baby Home here in Tuam.

The moral and ethical responsibility to make the right decision on what to recommend to Government is something I take very serious.

No matter what decision is arrived at it will not please everyone.

However, what I hope is possible is to assure everyone that the recommendation to Government will be made on a principled and empathetic basis.

So let me take this opportunity to outline some of the key principles that are guiding me in discerning what is the right thing to do.

Firstly, I am committed to making sure that we comply with international standards and norms when designing and implementing the decision on Tuam, including our obligations under international human rights law.

In this respect I have been greatly aided by a report prepared by Dr Geoffrey Shannon on the human rights issues that arise in the case of Tuam.

It is fair to say that Dr Shannon concludes that from a human rights perspective we have a duty to act, as far as reasonably possible. This report is being considered by the Office of the Attorney General. It will be published once I bring it to Government in early September.

Secondly, I want to make sure that all of those affected are central to the design and implementation of what we do next.

This includes both the former residents of the Home and their families and relations, and the resident of Tuam. I am well aware that Tuam is more than this history. It is a community and a place of goodness and care.

The former Mother and Baby Home is part of its story, but it is not all of it. Similarly, experiences in Tuam are part of the lives, histories and stories of former residents, but they are also not everything.

I hope to be able to ensure that we honour all of these parts of the identities and realities of those affected. I will not shy away from the challenge that this poses.

Thirdly, and relatedly, women’s rights must be respected in this process. What happened in Tuam was part of a pattern of gender injustice that we cannot overcome if we do not acknowledge it.

So often it was women—either as mothers or as children—who were affected. Their voices and their rights must be central.

Similarly, and fourthly, I am committed to taking a child-centred approach. That has always been a commitment of mine in my work, and is all the more so now in my work as Minister for Children and Youth Affairs.

Fifthly, I am committed to developing real partnerships through which we can make and implement decisions. To the extent possible I want us to approach this in a non-hierarchical and constructive manner.

That is why I established the Collaborative Forum which will meet for the first time this week, and why I am here with you this evening.

These principles are not just words on a page. They mean a lot to me personally, and shape the decisions I must make now and may need to make in the future.

They are based in my belief that we must place at the very core of our consideration our ethical and moral duties of justice and love towards those who lived and died in the Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.

As Proust says in Remembrance of Things Past:

We must act with empathy and compassion towards those we previously abandoned.

Empathy and compassion are allies of love. We must recognise that there is an on-going relationship between us, the living, and those who died in Tuam.

At the heart of that relationship is the bond of love between each human person, which requires us always to act with empathy towards others, especially those who have been shamed and stigmatised in the past.

In this case, it demands that we make decisions that recognise these were people whose futures were denied them, with families and relatives, and that they were part of our community.

It is that commitment to love that will help us to deliver justice for what happened in our past.

At this stage, I want to share with you my personal vision of where we should be heading, informed by those principles I have already outlined.

You will be aware that I published the results of the important consultation process that was led by Galway Co Council recently.

It highlights the very different but equally valid views expressed by those affected and who participated in the consultation.

In brief, those who were resident in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home, and their relatives, are strongly supportive of a full forensic excavation of the site. In contrast, local residents of the site favour memorialisation and with no further investigative work or disturbance of the site.

I can appreciate and respect both views, but they are obviously mutually exclusive.

This means that as we progress our vision for the site, I must work closely with local residents to ensure that their concerns are addressed and that, even in the absence of consensus, we can proceed in collaboration and partnership, adopting a rights-based approach.

Based on my considerations so far, I believe that an approach based on human rights and the principles I have already outlined would involve taking all reasonable steps to investigate the scope for retrieval of human remains and, if logistically possible, to exhume and re-inter the bodies in a respectful and sensitive manner.

Of course, questions of scale arise here, which are not altogether straightforward.

In particular, a decision must be taken on whether the rights-based approach to which I am committed requires full excavation of all land formerly occupied by the Mother and Baby Home, or whether it would be more appropriate to test all the land and then excavate those areas where anomalies arise, as well of course as the Memorial Garden and subsurface chambers.

The latter is less disruptive though still thorough, however it does not absolutely eliminate the unlikely possibility of some remains being undetected.

The former eliminates all such risk, but we cannot know from the outset that it would in fact result in a more complete investigation.

That is, we cannot say for certain that we would find out anything we would not have discovered through the slightly less intrusive and more targeted approach.

In other words, we cannot know that one is ‘more right’ than the other.

Instead, I must use the principles outlined above to help me to make a judgement between these approaches.

It is not something to which there is a single right answer; it is only something to which we must try to achieve the best possible answer, and your views this evening on this would be of great assistance to me.

Unfortunately this is not straightforward. There are some scientific challenges that we must overcome. There are also some ethical challenges about the treatment of remains.

But of an urgent nature are the many legal issues to be dealt with, the most important of which is to make sure we actually have legal authority to exhume the remains, examine them, carry out successful DNA tests where possible, and re-inter them in a place to be agreed. This is part of the complexity to which I have previously referred and it is a part that we cannot ignore; we must act in a lawful manner.

It is also one of the primary reasons why I have not yet been able to make recommendations to Government, although I would very much have hoped to be able to do so, and to have had a Government decision, by now.

However, let me assure you that if what seems to me to be the best approach requires us to introduce legislation to ensure it can be done, then I will not be dissuaded from that task.

I do not mean, here, to understate the challenge facing us. It involves the law relating to burials, graves, exhumations and coronial practices. It covers the actions that can be taken by An Garda Síochána, orders of the Courts and the giving of authority to State bodies to take specific action.

It also relates to decisions about DNA testing, and to who can make a formal determination about identification of an individual when scientific testing has been completed.

This all sounds so impersonal and clinical – which unfortunately it is – and yet we must deal with these matters despite the immensely deep, personal stories underlying each and every baby and child who was buried in the site.

We must do so because we need to have a clear legal framework to deliver on what I believe is our shared commitment to doing what is right here.

Hearing these sensitive, difficult issues spoken about as legal challenges is difficult, not least because we all want action as soon as possible. I certainly do.

But for the moment, all I can say is that we are working our way through these extraordinarily difficult legal and practical issues so that the government will be empowered to address fully this shameful part of our collective past.

I very much hope to be able to bring proposals to Government by the early Autumn, and I commit to being as open as possible as things develop.

It is always my intention to carry out my role as Minister in a transparent manner, to keep people informed of my decisions, to explain delays, and to listen and hear what people have to say.

This is particularly true in relation to the Mother and Baby Homes matters.

Unfortunately, solutions are often harder to find than expected, and delays sometimes cannot be avoided.

What I can assure you of however is my commitment to moving this issue forward, to working in partnership with all those affected, and to being as honest as I can be about the decisions that are being made, the basis upon which they are being made, and the challenges we face in trying to give effect to them.

ENDS