Mother and baby home survivors have slammed religious organisations for failing to contribute to a redress scheme, with one saying: “It’s a blow to the teeth".
Only one of the eight religious orders involved in mother and baby homes will contribute what the Government says they should to a redress scheme. The Sisters of Bon Secours was the only group to make a “meaningful contribution” and pledged €12.9m.
David Kinsella, 66, faced a brutal early childhood at St Patrick’s on Dublin’s Navan Road, where he lived for the first four years of his life. Speaking to the Irish Mirror, he said: “It’s a blow in the teeth regarding the payments that the two charities are offering, especially because we’re an aging survivor community.
“It is disappointing, and to add this to the already mess of the penny-pinching that the Government has done to survivors. I’m totally disappointed that the other congregations haven’t come on board, particularly St Patrick’s Navan Rd, it was the largest of all the institutions, and it had the largest proportion of mass deaths.”
Sheila O’Byrne, who was sent to the same mother and baby home on the Navan Road at 19, has also slammed the Government for not “going in harder” when asking for payments from the charities. She said: “They should have gone in harder, they said ‘We would like you’ [to contribute] instead of saying ‘This is the way it is’.
“I think they [the religious organisations] should have paid their fair share, they got a lot of hard labour for free, they got everything for free. And after all the hard work that I did to get things up and running for the redress scheme, especially all the older women.”
Ms O’Byrne has been fighting for justice for survivors all her life after her son was harrowingly taken from her arms by nuns in 1976. Mr Kinsella, from Clondalkin, said he is one of the “lucky” survivors in a sense because he was in a home long enough to qualify for the mother and baby institutions payment scheme.
Those who spent less than six months in a mother-and-baby home were excluded from the scheme. Survivors who were eligible received payments for every day they were in a home.
This means those like Mr Kinsella, who was subject to vaccine trials and hospitalised six times during the first four years of his life, received less. He said: “I was in and out of hospital, I was constantly ill back and forth to St Kevin’s Hospital so I wouldn’t have been allocated them days lost in hospital as part of the redress.
“Regarding this couple of million that one or two of the religious organisations are willing to pay, the Government should keep a portion of that for the survivors under six months. And what was whitewashed back in 2000 was the vaccine trials that went on, they will never be raised again in survivors' lifetimes, they will never see justice for inappropriate vaccine trials.”
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