Archive for the ‘Children and Youth Affairs’ Category
Statement from the Coalition of Mother and Baby Homes Survivors
Well known campaigner and author Paul Jude Redmond has resigned from Minister Zappone’s Survivors Forum claiming it is a ‘cynical, time wasting farce of no benefit to living survivors’. The full text of his letter of resignation is below.
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SURVIVORS ANGRY AT LATEST ZAPPONE STUNT
SAMPLING HALF THE FILES AND IGNORING THE OTHER HALF IS SHAMEFUL
The latest press release and unilateral action taken by Minister Zappone once again utterly fails the adoption and survivor communities.
The so called ‘sampling’ of a handful of Tusla and Adoption Authority files is a shameful cop out and a full and through investigation needs to take place immediately. This is simply too little, too late for survivors. Sampling a handful of Tusla records willfully ignores the fact that many of the adoption records are still in the hands of private adoption agencies and societies who are being given the time and space to ‘audit’ their own files and ‘correct’ so called wrongful registrations; ‘wrongful’ meaning criminal in this instance. The Minister needs to prioritise the immediate confiscation of all adoption records held in private hands by old school agencies such as Cunamh and the Protestant agency, P.A.C.T., etc.
Once again, with Minister Zappone’s latest stunt, she has continued her policy of completely ignoring the survivor and adoption communities and taken a solo run behind our backs with only a few hours notice. Will Minister Zappone never learn?
CMABS notes there are two separate issues here. One was the religiously driven side of the adoption machine and the other was around 300 private nursing homes dotted around the state and driven not by religious ideology but by greed and avarice. Many of the private nursing homes were little more than ‘baby farms’ and centers of criminal baby trafficking: fake and forged documentation was a common method of hiding their crimes. CMABS notes that not only has the Minister refused to undertake a proper audit of the adoption societies and agencies themselves but, Minister Zappone has deliberately ignored the other half of this wide ranging scandal. Once again, the survivors of past crimes against pregnant single women and girls, and their innocent babies, have been ignored and thrown to the wolves by an uncaring Minister and Government.
CMABS once again reiterates it’s long held belief that all of these issues are interlinked and were part of a system. A full system-wide approach needs to be taken. Realistically, the only correct road forward is to expand the Terms of Reference of the current Inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes and after it’s final Report on the matters currently under investigation is completed next February 2019, the Inquiry should continue and complete a through investigation into ALL of these issues. The Mother and Baby home Inquiry should be the last Inquiry into these issues and it should have a wide ranging Terms of Reference to fully complete it’s work. Anything less is an inhuman and cold blooded slap in the face to an elderly and dying survivor community…
CMABS notes that Minister Zappone has been in possession of the facts about Saint Patrick’s Guild for a number of months while she ‘decided’ whether or not to inform the victims of crime of their illegal adoptions. This is an absolute disgrace and a resigning matter. Minister Zappone has no right to play God with peoples’ lives or the truth. The health and well being of survivors, their medical histories, their inheritance rights and their constitutional right to their identity, is non negotiable and not a matter for cheap political decisions.