I am going to talk about Bessborough, but I will also talk about the entire system of mother and baby homes, industrial schools and county homes. We have had many apologies in this House, and rightly so; they are welcome. Too often, however, the State has failed to truly get to grips with what was actually in place in this State, that is, an entire system that was integrated between county homes, Magdalen laundries, mother and baby homes and industrial schools. To say it was a dark period of our history is an understatement, and I will return to that because it is not merely history. This was an entire system that had the imprimatur of the State and that the State was entirely complicit in. The State's response has always been to treat it as piecemeal and a bit of wrongdoing by institutions here and there, instead of really confronting the fact the State fully endorsed and was part of this system, and to a large extent relied on the system. There has not been a frank and honest recognition of the pain that was caused. The most obvious example of that was the heartlessness of the six-month limit for compensation under the mother and baby home scheme, as if the trauma of separation was any less for those who fell under that bracket. We know now very clearly that trauma exists right from birth and that separation would have been created. That was one of the most callous proposals and decisions adopted by any Government in recent years. Bessborough puts it into stark relief. We can all acknowledge maternal health in the forties and fifties in Ireland was not what it should have been, but to say the standards in Bessborough fell below that does not even begin to cover it. Public health reports looking at this saw an infant mortality rate of 82% in some years in the forties. The cause of death of some 20% of the deaths in Bessborough in the forties and fifties was marasmus, a form of severe malnutrition. People were dying in Bessborough in Cork in the forties and fifties for want of food and nutrition. It is also important to say this is not only history, and we would make a profound mistake in treating this as only a period that can be looked back on and examined in a historical context. There are people in the Public Gallery and watching on whose brothers, sisters and mothers were in Bessborough. For those people, this is profoundly real. This is about being able to identify where their loved ones were buried; that is what we are talking about. I was at an oral hearing for one of the previous applications, which was thankfully refused, and I remember a debate between esteemed, capable people who had different opinions on how to interpret old ordnance survey maps. One set of experts was trying to say, "Well, the marking there for a burial ground represents the order's burial ground over here", while another expert was saying, "No, very clearly, this burial ground could potentially have been there." Which of them was right? The point of this, and what has stayed with me since then, is that this was no ordinary housing application. This was a housing application talking about whether or not children had been buried there. That was the fundamental point. It is no ordinary planning application that we are discussing now. It is profoundly wrong and hurtful to build there. The Government will say it cannot interfere in planning locations, but there could have been a Government intervention in the Institutional Burials Bill. It is not only in Bessborough but also in Sean Ross Abbey and other locations across the State, and the Government should have recognised that. We have been talking for some time in this House about this issue as regards the institutions and where children were buried. Some 700 children who died at Bessborough are unaccounted for. We do not know where they are buried. It is absolutely appalling. I have talked about the State's complicity in this. A story just reported today that the State's Chief Medical Adviser, James Deeny, communicated to Bessborough that they would put aside their investigation if the death rate continued to decline. That is what we are talking about here, the potential burial place of children. The Government needs to find some legislative mechanism to ensure sites such as this and across the State are protected, because this is not the only location.

Sentiment score: -0.01