17 May 2022
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has said the Mother and Baby Homes redress scheme must be significantly broadened to include all survivors. In a submission to the Oireachtas Children’s Committee, the human rights organisation said the scheme is based on a deeply flawed report that did not properly address the human rights abuses that occurred in all institutions involved in forced family separations. The proposed redress scheme excludes some categories of survivors, denies legal aid and forces survivors to sign a legal waiver, diluting their right to access justice.
ICCL’s Head of Legal and Policy, Doireann Ansbro, said:
“The government must recognise that repairing the huge damage caused by these institutions is not a favour that they can choose to grant to some survivors; they are legally obliged to provide reparations to all survivors. The scheme as it is just doesn’t meet those obligations and the State is leaving itself wide open to legal challenge.”
ICCL has previously identified gross human rights violations including arbitrary detention, modern slavery, ill treatment and enforced disappearances as having taken place at these institutions. Though the Mother and Baby Homes report contained evidence of these violations, it did not codify them as such or make adequate recommendations to remedy them.
This pattern of minimising the seriousness of these crimes and the harms done has continued with this redress scheme. ICCL has identified significant and unexplained discrepancies between other redress schemes and this one. We are at a loss to explain why, for example, the scheme has been arbitrarily capped at €800 million and no one will be able to a make a claim after five years.
It is estimated that this Scheme will cover 34,000 survivors from an estimated 58,000. This will potentially leave up to 24,000 survivors without adequate compensation, and with the additional insult of being made to feel their trauma is somehow not enough to merit redress. The injustice of being excluded from the scheme is particularly acute for children who were boarded out or who spent less than six months in an institution but were permanently separated from family and loved ones.
The legal waiver, which survivors must sign in order to claim redress and which prevents them from bringing any further claims against the State, is unjust and inappropriate. It runs entirely contrary to the legal principle of redress and should be removed from the scheme immediately.
ENDS/
Find the ICCL submission to the Oireachtas Children’s Committee here: https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ICCL-Submission-on-the-General-Scheme-of-a-Mother-and-Baby-Institutions-Payment-Scheme-Bill.pdf
Find an ICCL briefing on the Mother and Baby Homes report: https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Press-briefing-ICCL-analysis-of-MBHC-report.pdf
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) is Ireland’s oldest independent human rights campaigning organisation. We monitor, educate and campaign to secure human rights for everyone in Ireland.
For comment: Doireann Ansbro
For media queries: sinead.nolan@iccl.ie