Redress legislation ‘inadvertently’ includes hundreds of thousands of married women

Hundreds of thousands of married women who gave birth in county homes could be eligible for payments under legislation going through the Oireachtas, dramatically increasing the cost of the intended redress scheme for residents of mother and baby homes by billions of euros.

A former researcher on the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes has warned that the legislation as currently drafted “inadvertently” includes hundreds of thousands of women who could now be eligible for the minimum €5,000 payment under the proposed redress scheme.

Writing in The Irish Times today, historian Michael Dwyer said the Bill “inadvertently makes hundreds of thousands of married women who gave birth in the institutions eligible for redress”.

“The authors of the Payment Scheme Bill appear to have assumed that the 44 institutions included in the redress scheme were standalone mother and baby institutions that catered exclusively for single expectant women and their children,” he writes. “This criteria did apply to institutions such as Bessborough, Sean Ross and Castlepollard but most institutions included in the redress scheme offered maternity services to all women, regardless of marital status.”

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Citing the example of one institution covered by the Bill, he writes: “From 1922 to 1998, the period covered by the redress Bill, around 150,000 women were admitted to Cork County Home and District Hospital/St Finbarr’s Hospital as maternity cases – between 75,000 and 100,000 women were admitted after 1960.

“Under the terms of the redress scheme every one of these women would be eligible for the minimum €5,000 payment – a cost of between €75 million and €100 million to the State. And this is just one institution – there are 43 more to be considered.”

[ Redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby homes approved by Dáil ]

In response to questions from The Irish Times, the Department of Equality suggested that as research was continuing on the institutions in question, amendments could be brought forward during the legislative process in the Oireachtas to take account of the need to “refine” the scheme’s operation.

“In order to deliver the scheme as swiftly as possible for survivors, the legislation is currently being advanced in parallel with work on the operational infrastructure. This includes work relating to access to records for county home institutions. This parallel work is informing the development of the Bill in terms of amendments which are being made to clarify and refine it as it progresses through the Houses,” the department said.

“It is true that county homes absorbed a broader range of the populace than unmarried women, indeed the history of these institutions, emerging as they did from workhouses, is a much more complex one than the mother and baby homes, with many of them becoming public nursing homes from the 1960s onwards.”

When pressed as to whether amendments will be introduced to narrow the scope of the existing Bill, the department said: “Any amendments to refine the Bill as it progresses through the Houses will remain consistent with this purpose and scope.”