I pay tribute to Carmel Cantwell, Noelle Brown who I see in the Gallery, and other survivors and those affected by the crimes committed at Bessborough Mother and Baby Institution. I called it a "home" at the protest last week and I was rightly rounded upon and told it should be called an institution because these were institutions of brutality and oppression that traumatised, stigmatised and brutalised women, and of course led to the deaths of 923 children. It is a horrific stain. Over the next few weeks we will be celebrating the Irish revolution - the 1916 Rising. One of the greatest - and in my opinion the greatest - Irish revolutionary, whose bust is behind us, was James Connolly. He was a revolutionary as well as a socialist and warned that if the country was partitioned it would lead to a "carnival or reaction" North and South. Connolly was very consciously an advocate for women's liberation and believed that if the Irish struggle for freedom did not liberate women it would be a hollow victory. When he was warning about the carnival or reaction that would result from partition, he was very specifically worried about what would happen to women in a partitioned Ireland where reactionary forces gained dominance in the State. It is appropriate then that Bessborough was set up in 1922 - the year of partition - as part of a policy by the new State of outsourcing the care of women and children to the Catholic Church which then ran institutions where, in one year, three out of four children died, many of them of starvation. I was reading an article I was sent by Donal O'Keeffe in The Echo about the fact in 1947 the State’s Chief Medical Officer’s papers have revealed a threatened investigation by the State into 700 deaths at the time in Bessborough was abandoned if there was a commitment to reduce the number of deaths of children to single digits. It is horrendous what was going on. They did not investigate at the time and the deaths continued, though they reduced. The dark stain we are talking about on the history of this State is due to its treatment of women and children, its stigmatisation of women because they did not comply with a twisted notion of morality and then the actual deaths of children, the burial place of hundreds of whom remain unaccounted for. It is unbelievable. The idea we would go from that to prioritising the interests of property developers says it all about the carnival of reaction Connolly warned of. We go from this killing of children, effectively, this starvation of children who were buried in unmarked graves – the disappearance of children – to property developers profiting. We cannot do anything about it even though we are trampling on the sensitivities of people who have been brutalised in these horrific institutions. I was saying at the protest last week that I was born in a mother and baby home. I recently went with my mother to try to find the place. It had been in Highgate in north London and we could not find it. I have been reunited with my mother and the outcome has been a good one. I met somebody at the protest, Sarah - she said it was okay to mention her name - from Cork. She said to me afterwards that she was born in the Highgate mother and baby home, which we did not manage to find. That mattered to me and it matters to her. I got some messages from other people who said they were born in Highgate. We were disappeared to England and then quietly brought back to be adopted. Our outcomes were okay but Sarah was born in Highgate and then was in Bessborough. She is out there protesting; a second generation of people affected by all of this. The thought that we will build on this site, and that the Government will not intervene to make up and compensate for this State's failure of the hundreds of women and children who lie buried in unmarked graves, and for the trauma that has afflicted on the survivors and those affected, is horrendous. The Government can do it. As has been said, it could lodge an objection. Deputy Coppinger was absolutely right. The Government should intervene and prevent the crime being compounded for those who have suffered in these institutions.

Sentiment score: -0.13