Renewed criticism over investigation into mother-and-baby homes

RTE News
July 22, 2015

http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/0722/716503-mother-and-baby-homes/

Leader of the Bethany Survivors Group Derek Leinster, who had travelled from England with his wife Carol, also addressed the gathering.

A commemoration event was held at Mount Jerome Cemetery this afternoon

The Protestant-run Bethany Home in Dublin

There has been renewed criticism of the Government's ongoing failure to include two Protestant institutions in the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes.

Dr Niall Meehan of the Bethany Survivors Group has also criticised the Government's continuing failure to offer redress to former residents despite including the Dublin home in the commission's terms of reference.

Dr Meehan made his remarks in the course of an address to a memorial meeting for survivors of the Bethany Home at Mount Jerome Cemetery where 227 children were discovered five years ago buried in unmarked graves.

Welcoming the Government's inclusion of that Protestant-run home in the Murphy Commission's terms of reference, Dr Meehan criticised the failure to commit to paying redress. 

He said this failure had occurred despite proof of government complicity in death and neglect from the 1920s until the 1950s.

"That cannot be permitted and, as Irish citizens, we must not permit it," he told his audience of ageing survivors and their supporters.

They included Lord Mayor of Dublin Críona Ní Dhálaigh, former Labour party minister of state Joe Costello and Sinn Féin Deputy Leader Mary Lou McDonald.

Dr Meehan also criticised the exclusion from Judge Yvonne Murphy's terms of reference of the defunct Braemar Rescue Home for Protestant Girls in Cork and the old Westbank home in Greystones, Co Wicklow.

Earlier this month, a commission spokesperson told RTÉ News that both Braemar and Westbank had come to its attention and that they would probably be looked at in their capacity as residents' exit routes from the 14 homes mentioned in the terms of reference.

The spokesperson added that the commission would investigate them fully if they too were included in the terms, and that it was up to the Government alone to amend the terms if it wanted to.

Dr Meehan told this afternoon's commemoration that the proof that Braemar was a mother-and-baby home was that when a Westbank survivor, Victor Stevenson, was a newborn baby in 1959, his mother brought him there.

He said that if "this scandal continues", Judge Murphy's inquiry will inevitably be incomplete, and some survivors will continue to knock on the door or to bang their heads on the State's brick wall.

He said a commission spokesperson had said last week that Judge Murphy would not be asking for the Braemar home to be included in the commission's terms of reference. The excuse given was that it would be an additional burden, he added.

"There you have it," said Dr Meehan "The included survivors are a burden to be carried by the commission, while those excluded will not be a burden on the state. This does not augur well."

Call to pressurise politicians

Turning to the Westbank orphanage, he said children there suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse which the State has failed to investigate and does not wish to investigate now.

Dr Meehan said that in 1978, Joseph Robbins of the Department of Health said Westbank was a home for "children who, in the main, are abandoned or unwanted". 

"That describes the attitude to Westbank survivors today, abandoned and unwanted," said Dr Meehan.

"The state uses the excuse that Westbank was an orphanage, albeit one where the vast majority of children were denied adoption. They were too useful as revenue generators in Northern Ireland," he said, "in the guise of poor Protestant orphans".

He urged his audience "to become as much of a burden as we possibly can" by pressurising local councillors, TDs, senators, MEPs and the Government.

He said they should also ask - and expect - churches that at one time sent women and children to the Bethany and other homes to help keep up the pressure.

Church of Ireland Rector of Zion Parish, Rev Stephen Farrell, recited prayers in the cemetery oratory before the participants walked behind a lone bagpiper to the Bethany Memorial some distance away.