Ceann Comhairle, I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important matter in this House.
When we came to Office, we set out to undo the damage, to heal some of the hurt, inflicted on the most vulnerable in our society.
One of those groups was the Magdalene Women, the unseen launderers, of our country’s stain and secrets.
We issued a state apology to those women and established a Restorative Justice Scheme in June 2013.
When I meet them in London, they tell me about the difference that apology made to their lives and about the changes the restorative aspect is making. There have been 804 applications with €23m paid out to date.
Last year, we set up the Statutory Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters. We need to know and will find out what happened to these women, these girls and their babies between 1922 and 1998.
The previous year, 2014, the Government established the Surgical Symphysiotomy Payment Scheme. This was to provide an alternative, non-adversarial option for the women affected. There were 578 applications resulting in €23m allocations at the end of 2015.
If Ireland was declared by Yeats to be no country for old men, the legacy issues I have just mentioned suggest it was positively treacherous, and at times omnipotent, when it came to our girls and women.
Immediately when we came to office we began to look at these issues. And we started by focusing our attention on our children which coincided with the so-called Cloyne Report on sexual violence inflicted on children in the Cloyne diocese.
I was anxious that the trauma inflicted on these children be addressed.
That we would make it clear as a country, that it was the constitution and our code of law that was paramount, nothing else.
For the first time, we set about creating a full Cabinet Ministry for Children and Youth Affairs.
We established the Child and Family Agency, with a regime of strict governance and stricter accountability for child and family services.
Under new National Standards for the Protection and Welfare of Children (2012), frontline services for children and families became subject to independent HIQA inspection for the first time.
The New Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 2015 includes stronger sanctions aimed at protecting children from sexual exploitation, child-abuse material and online grooming.
The Criminal Justice (Withholding of Information on Offences Against Children and Vulnerable Persons) Act 2012 makes it an offence to withhold information on serious offences committed against a child or a vulnerable adult.
With Children First, we gave children their voice.
We recognised them as individuals in their own right under the constitution for the first time.
And because we did, it is the best interest of the child, that is paramount now, in every decision taken by a public body, in matters related to them.
Putting our children first was a long time coming. But at last it is here.
In terms of disability, HIQA have carried out over 1,370 inspections of residential settings for adults and children with disabilities since regulations started in 2014.
I believe I can speak for everybody here and many outside this House when I say that the words do not exist to describe, adequately, the depth and the volume of the revulsion we feel about the alleged abuse and failures we’ve heard of.
I believe, equally, that the agreement in principle of a Commission of Inquiry, is the right way to address the enormity and the depravity of what has been uncovered.
Grace, because of her condition, was silent. But by her treatment and her abandonment she was silenced.
Those who left her to her fate, pressed the mute button on her young life and appalling experience.
Above all, they pressed that mute button on her dignity, her humanity, on her civil and human rights, on her innate worth as an innocent, precious, fragile life on this earth.
The question is, in ticking its boxes, was the system blind, was the system deaf, did the system possess so little awareness, so little accountability, that it could become a stone to Grace, to her abject experience, to her desperate need?
The Commission of Investigation will ask those questions. It will get the answers we need.
That it will do so, is vital to finding and re-establishing our co-ordinates, as a functioning, moral and responsible society.
Because in every procedure, in every system, in every action, taken in regard to Grace and others, there is not just a sense of public authority, crucially there is one of personal moral autonomy.
And this is heightened when we are dealing with children and other vulnerable people who are left in what was called in this instance ‘foster care’.
The hearts of the excellent foster parents of this country are breaking when they hear about Grace and others. They love the children who come to them as if they were their own.
I believe there is a resonance, that the last days of this administration should concern itself with such matters.
Because they are the very matters, of doing not what is correct, but as I said in my first day here as Taoiseach, of doing what is right.
With this commission we will seek to do right by Grace, and all the young people and adults, who have been similarly treated.
I believe it is the best and most thorough and powerful way to treat them with the grace and the respect and the kindness, of which their experience, their lives in care, were so devoid.
ENDS