I welcome to the Public Gallery people who were incarcerated in Bessborough and other institutions. I particularly welcome Councillor Noelle Brown who was born in Bessborough and who has been an activist in this area for decades. Noelle has tirelessly highlighted the wrong done in this country. We are at a tipping point in how we acknowledge and make amends for our history and the large-scale human rights abuses that took place in mother and baby institutions. The incarceration of women and the forced disappearance of their infants and children, either through death or forced adoption, has left a legacy that affects not only survivors but us as a nation. Thanks to Catherine Corless, we finally have a sensitive excavation taking place in Tuam. It has signalled to survivors that these children mattered not only to their families and mothers but also to this country. The news that planning permission was granted at Bessborough, the site of another mass grave, caused deep pain for survivors of that institution and sent shock waves to survivors of other institutions where thousands of children's burials were also unaccounted for. The recent protest outside the Dáil and the phenomenal public support that followed illustrates clearly that the people of Ireland want the remains of the children in Bessborough dealt with equally sensitively as those at Tuam. The stories told by survivors were absolutely heartbreaking and they have been retraumatised by this planning permission. A second protest by students and teachers from Larkin Community College was a tender and sincere questioning of why the Bessborough children do not matter. These young people, students from the college, made paper hearts with the names of the 923 children whose remains are disposed of at Bessborough and the cruel way that each one of them died. It would take me 45 minutes to read out the names of every one of those 923 children. The children of Bessborough were not buried; they were disposed of in the hope that they would be forgotten and never recovered. The plan to build on that mass grave is a double cruelty at a time we should know better. This is not who we are as a country. This is not who we are as a nation. It is not what we want as a country to see happen. The children of Larkin Community College have been very clear in what they want. They want to make sure that every one of those children is valued and loved and remembered, not only by their families but by us as a country. It is well-documented that Bessborough was a cruel and cold place for every mother and every child incarcerated there. To have them subjected to that cruelty at their most vulnerable can never be forgotten. To leave a mother grieving the loss of her child for decades with no grave to visit, and then to decide to pour concrete over a sensitive site is a modern cruelty that has no place in Ireland in 2026. It is not who we are as a nation.

Sentiment score: -0.13