I thank Deputy Bacik and the Labour Party for this Bill. I welcome the visitors to the Public Gallery. I am sure it is not easy for them to listen to the back and forth on something that should be an easy and straightforward thing to do. The Social Democrats welcome this Bill. We are disappointed in the Government for the six-month delay. As has been said, perhaps some people do not have six months, and have waited a very long time for redress. As I have listened to this debate, it has struck me how many debates are had in this Chamber on this topic. I am sure previous speakers have said this already, but when people contact me to tell me what happened to them as a child, it is absolutely horrific to read the words, to hear people on the phone and to try to understand what a child experienced at the hands of an adult in this country. I am also absolutely certain this is not historic. I know we are talking about historic at present, but this is going on now. The reality is that they were alone as children. They were scared and vulnerable, but we do not seem to be able to understand that. When that person receives redress, that does not mean it wipes away the pain, the hurt and everything that happened to them as a child. Redress does not wipe that away. It is not an erasure, but a recognition that the wrongs that happened to that child were not and are not acceptable. It does not take away the pain, but it is a recognition. Going back for a moment, "RTÉ Investigates" had a very interesting documentary, which I am sure people have seen, that explained very clearly how the religious orders use these unincorporated bodies to hide their assets. To be very clear, these religious orders are still running schools. They are called something different; they are not called the Christian brothers but something else. They are still running schools, and have all these unincorporated bodies and resources. At the time of several redress schemes, the religious orders said they did not have the money to contribute as much to them. They did not have the money, yet over a 35-year period they sold 800 properties. They got rid of them; they had the money, so they were able to generate it. We were talking about dereliction earlier this week. The Department of education owns a huge amount of vacant properties that would have come originally through religious orders, so there are plenty of resources. However, these are organisations that successfully hid paedophiles in every nook and cranny of every institution and educational building. They were able to hide them so well, and now they are hiding in every nook and cranny any piece of property, cash or resources they have so that they do not have to feed back into the redress system. That is their responsibility. Yes, it is the responsibility of the State, but it is the responsibility of the people who perpetrated these horrific crimes on children to pay for that. The "RTÉ Investigates" documentary reported that there were members of the Christian brothers organisation who were not only paedophiles, but were also responsible for setting up the structures and making sure the resources were not able to be used. That is something that came as a shock to many people. This is a State failure, but we cannot pass the buck to others. We need to ensure mechanisms of the State are able to reach into those orders and get behind the red tape. It is fixable. I suppose I am a little frustrated because if you think if there is a problem, you fix it. There is a solution here; Deputy Bacik is giving a very clear and easy solution. We are able to tackle these unincorporated bodies. I had somebody contact me by email - I am not going to give his name because I do not have permission - who told me he has to sue 120 Christian brothers. That is in the High Court. It is not acceptable to hide behind this. For people who maybe do not understand, trauma has a way of incorporating every part of your body - sorry for the pun there. It takes over your whole body and mind. To be able to deal with sexual abuse trauma and then have to navigate a system that is set against you is absolutely cruel and is totally avoidable. Going back to the survivors for a minute, it is utterly heartbreaking. I keep saying "heartbreaking". I am a mother. I have children. I keep thinking of how the survivors were failed, but we are continuing to fail them. We keep coming back in here, talking about it, proposing things and then delaying it. I do not understand why we are delaying it. Maybe that is how survivors feel. They do not understand why so many barriers and blockages have to be put in their way, when the State is saying it sees them, hears them and will do redress, but it will only do redress if they lived in the mother and baby homes for more than six months. I do not understand what the difference is between living there for five minutes or six months. It is a trauma that continues for the rest of their lives. How do you measure those things? When we stood in this Chamber, when Helen McEntee was Minister for Education, and discussed what would happen with regard to sexual abuse in schools in Ireland, so many people said that had to be a trauma-focused, survivor-focused way of approaching it. It needs to allow people to speak, not to speak, to find a space and to not be retraumatising, yet here we are again, having this conversation, and there will be a delay. The Government has said several times, on so many Bills over the last year, that the Opposition never comes up with any solutions and only criticises it. The Labour Party is giving an excellent solution here, yet the Government's new thing, and I say new as if I have been here for years when I have not, seems to be to put a delay on things. I ask the Government to please not do that. It is unfair to the victims, the survivors and those people who suffered in our schools. When education and health is outsourced to organisations, that does not mean the responsibility for it can be outsourced. The State has had to pay a significant amount of money in redress, and rightly so. The religious orders, the other organisations and other unincorporated bodies, of which there are so many that I will not be able to name them all, need to be able to pay back and should be paying back, but they are not, because they are smart and they are moving their money around. Maybe this is possible because maybe a really rich organisation is able to move its money around, and I am just naive. What I am not naive about is the fact that people who have been educated in this country and have been in institutions deserve better, and we have to try better. The Government needs to catch up with the rest of us with regard to empathy and a trauma-informed way of looking at things, because this is not it, and putting that delay on this Bill is a disgrace. I would like the Minister of State, Deputy O'Donnell, to take that back to Government and ask Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and all the other people who make up the Government to please discuss it. We are now looking at a situation where there is a solution which will help people. It will never ever wipe away the pain that those children, now adults, have endured, but it may do something to help, and it will perhaps be less traumatising and less retraumatising.

Sentiment score: -0.02