Calls to dismiss mother and baby homes report one-eyed

Efforts to undermine the Mother and Baby Homes report does a disservice to survivors, writes Ruadhán Jones

When one of the authors of the recent Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes – historian Prof. Mary Daly –was reported as saying that the commission had discounted hundreds of statements made by survivors of the homes, it caused a predictable and justifiable stir.

It would be a great injustice if these personal testimonies, made to the Confidential Committee, were treated as effectively useless because they were not given under oath. It would also confirm for those who hope to overthrow the report that its methodology was suspect, that its findings disregarded the testimonies of survivors and that its language was overly legalistic and cold.

The commission’s attitude towards survivors was characterised as “dismissive”, as Claire McGettrick of the Adoption Rights Alliance put it. Unsurprisingly, Prof. Daly’s comments, made before an Oxford University seminar, resulted in renewed calls for the Government to disown the report.

But as the professor’s comments saw the light of day in full, it was clear that her statements did not match the initial reports, or were at least more subtle. First off, she stated that the evidence given to the Confidential Committee, which ran in tandem with the commission, was incorporated into that committee’s report. This was then used where possible for the commission’s final report.

“We used what we could,” Prof. Daly said regarding the survivors’ testimonies, adding that much of the evidence given, while moving, wasn’t relevant to the commission. “We got descriptions of cleaning, other jobs, nobody described really heavy work to us. I think what most of them talked about was the monotony of the place.”

Aside from the lack of relevance to the commission’s report, a second issue they faced in incorporating the testimonies was that they couldn’t cross-check the statements. “It would have taken hundreds of hours of cross checking, re-reading against the other evidence available from registers and so on,” Prof. Daly said. “Then maybe interrogation… and then maybe working out how to integrate the two.”

In other words, they didn’t have the time to ensure the individual stories could be incorporated fully while meeting the standards of objectivity and factual accuracy required for the final report. They were given a rigorous set of guidelines to follow, ones which were laid out by the government of the time.

A letter sent to the Oireachtas Children’s Committee by Judge Yvonne Murphy, another of the commissioners, sheds further light on the difficulties the commission faced and the reasons for its choices with regard to survivor testimony. Her letter was sent in response to a request from the Oireachtas for the authors to appear before the committee. She refused, saying: “The independence, procedures and safeguards under which the commission carried out its investigation and its carefully considered conclusions would be set at nought by an appearance before your committee and in circumstances especially where prejudgement is already manifest.”

Refuse

While I believe she is wrong to refuse, especially given that Prof. Daly is willing to publicly discuss the report elsewhere, she is trenchant in defending the report’s integrity and her letter sets out in detail the method and aim of the commission’s work. I encourage everyone to read it in full. She highlights the strict code they had to follow, the Commissions of Investigation Act 2004 and the terms of reference, as set out by the Government in 2015.

It was these that determined the scope and shape of the report. It had to be of “a general nature on the experiences of the single women and children which the commission may, to the extent it considers appropriate, rely upon”. The commission was directed to investigate 14 mother and baby homes and a sample of county homes over a 76-year period.

In line with the terms of reference, they established a confidential committee “to provide a forum for persons who were formerly resident in the homes… during the relevant period to provide accounts of their experience in these institutions in writing or orally as informally as is possible in the circumstances”. It is this committee that heard the testimony of survivors, and the findings of which the commission was accused of ignoring.

But Judge Murphy, as did Prof. Daly, insists that the work of this commission “is reflected in its final report and its interim reports and not by commentators who seek to sweep aside its findings”: “While the confidential committee was separately constituted, its report is an important element of the commission’s final report”, she writes.

She goes on to note, however, that the “general nature” of the commission’s final report required that confidentiality be maintained. She adds that the individual accounts were integrated where the Commission “considered appropriate having regard to the totality of the evidence gathered by the commission and before making its findings”. The “totality of the evidence” is an important point, as Judge Murphy says that 304 mothers gave evidence, of whom 18 were in the institutions pre-1960.

Institutions

Compare this with the 24,207 mothers who were in the institutions investigated in the period 1960-1998 – “the experiences of one per cent of those are reflected in the confidential committee report”, Judge Murphy says in the letter and she asserts that, while the value of the report of the confidential committee should not be underestimated, “it cannot be taken as a definitive history of mother and baby homes and associated topics”.

That is not to suggest that abuse did not take place in the homes. The report details graphic accounts of the abuses women underwent and the “callous disregard” with which they were often treated. But the use of the testimonies to inform the commission’s findings was not and is not straightforward. Calling for the report to be discarded or disowned would not only be a disservice to the work of the commissioners, but also to the survivors, who deserve more than political manoeuvring. They deserve the truth, and the commission’s report is an honest attempt to reach it.