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BABY HOMES REPORT IS A
SICKENING WHITEWASH

The official inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes has absolved both the Church and State of any systemic responsibility for what it admits is the effective incarceration of pregnant mothers.
The report also fails to find that mothers were coerced into giving up their children. It merely reports that "some" mothers 'claim' they did not properly consent.
And the inquiry also seems to have made no recommendation of significant redress for affected mothers. Destroying a mothers life by forcibly removing her child is fine by the Commission. Most women gave up their baby voluntarily it insists!
To plug that embarrassing hole the government says a 'restorative recognition' scheme with still-unspecified awards will be launched in a few months. We can expect little or nothing by way of redress.
The bias of the Commission against mothers was apparent from it's first interim reports -which insisted that physical abuse and neglect was the only injury suffered by mothers. The mothers say and know that the massive abuse they suffered was the forced removal of their child.
The Commission is blind to this most grievous injury which was the reason for the inquiry in the first place. And it is blind to the coercion of mothers and the dubiously obtained consents to adopt.
The Government is also attempting to shoehorn mothers into the Collaborative Forum process it operates. This forum is mostly comprised of adopted people and academics -none of whom have experience as a mother in a home. Mothers have their own representative organization: Irish First Mothers -with whose 70 members the government will not engage.
And the Government continues to advance adoption information legislation which does not meet the legitimate demand of mothers for speedy access to unredacted information from their own medical and birth records.
Minister O'Gorman also made no reference to investigating the grounds of the many homes with infant remains. Only the Tuam site is to get special legislation -and even there a coroner's inquiry would be the quickest legal option.
There wasn't a single public hearing in the whole of the commission's work. Justice should be seen to be done properly -as garda Maurice McCabe found out. But this was justice behind closed doors. No justice.
The majority of testimony was unsworn by design and most who spoke to the so-called unsworn 'confidential committee' of the inquiry were kept unaware that they had an option to give sworn testimony.
This wasn't a Commission of Inquiry to obtain the Truth.
It was a Commission to bury the truth forever.
Just like they buried the babies.

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