Lynn Ruane
University of Dublin · Independent · Ireland
“The chairperson of the board of the Courts Service, Ms Justice Aileen Donnelly, said that the rise in drugs cases of a less serious kind had increased the workload of the lower courts.”
“I remember I could barely write when I started studying addiction. I was 16 when I applied for an addiction studies course. They would not let me on it because they said I was too young and it was for adults. I fought and fought. I did not know how to write an essay. I had not engaged in school since I was about 12.”
“The world is watching how Ireland has done the most extensive interrogation of drugs policy ever seen, and is waiting in hope to see what we do next to make sure that we move with the evidence. It is not just opinion.”
“I join Senator McDowell in thanking all the people we should thank for the efficient and smooth running of these Houses. He ran through them all. Even if we have had a few ding-dongs over rulings on amendments and stuff, other than that, things have moved well, as they always do. I thank the staff across both Houses.”
“There are not many things I will claim some level of expertise in, but this is one where I will claim it. I have been obsessed with it since I was about 16. I look forward to coming back in the new year, and not just for 90 minutes. We need a substantial time to discuss this report, whether three hours, four hours or six hours.”
“It will contain all incidents of prohibited AI practices under Article 5 of the AI Act; all serious incidents of high-risk AI systems in the State, reported under Article 73; high-risk AI systems that are employed in critical infrastructure; and any other AI-related incidents or notifications in the State required to be reported under the…”
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“The problem is that all we know is that the Minister, Deputy Carroll MacNeill, brought a memorandum to the Government this week recognising that Ireland should also evacuate patients' siblings for humanitarian reasons, but there has been no more clarity about when those family members will be reunited. We understand that the intention is reunification, but there is still no detail on how we will evacuate children to join their siblings, to ensure we offer full refuge and care to families. That is currently not happening and, unfortunately, the response still has not provided that clarity from the Department.”
“We must be very clear on the exact steps. An article published in The Irish Times yesterday insinuated that no one would be medically evacuated if they did not have a surviving parent to care for them. This is inaccurate. Bushra's three children did not have a surviving parent to evacuate with them. On aiding them on the other side, I do not know how to even begin to imagine a scenario where we try to co-ordinate the evacuation of three children on the other side, which means we need to identify an advocate or another family member to come with them.”
“The ten families are waiting and I paid particular attention to Bushra and her situation today, purposely because their father is also gone so they are on their own. There currently has been no communication for seven days with those young children.”
“He then communicated through his mother that he chose that because he could break the fingers into one finger of chocolate for each of his siblings. If we can see the level of bounds of that young boy's heart, we have to be able to keep his heart healing and keep it growing because his progression, his rehabilitation and his life depends on his family being here with him, just like those nine other families. Like I said, we cannot just focus on the physical living of an individual, we must focus on the whole. We must focus on their spiritual and psychological well-being and we must focus on being able to keep families together so they can begin to process the grief and trauma they have endured and they can do that together. What we need to know today is what actions are being taken to reunify those families.”
“When we provide physical care to somebody to keep them alive, we must understand that, as a whole person, as a whole family, we cannot keep them alive but then kill them spiritually and psychologically. We need to ensure that, in saving Mohammed, we also save his future and he is not left to carry the burden of wondering where his three siblings are today and not being able to connect with them and know they are still alive. They are also only children. We cannot orphan children in Gaza when they could be here with Bushra and with Mohammed. Last week when I met this young, amazing, resilient boy, beyond any resilience I think any of us could comprehend, we went over to the canteen to buy a bar of chocolate and he chose a Kit Kat.”
“They have been displaced three times since Bushra arrived here with her son. Mohammed spoke about missing playing with his siblings. I have done nothing but think about play since then, which is probably an unusual thing to think about but we heal grief through play. When we think of our sibling relationships, it is a moment where we feel freedom. When you think of the hypervigilance Mohammed and his family must have felt in Gaza and the trauma they experienced, we truly feel our sovereign selves when we engage and sit into play because, for those moments, we can at least be free from the trauma that has completely enveloped their lives. Mohammed currently does not have his three siblings with him and that is an absolute travesty. There is a fine line between not being dead and being alive.”
“Today, I find this Commencement matter a little difficult to think about. Before I came into the Chamber, I got word that one of the families I reference in this have not heard from their three children in Gaza since I met them last week. That mother is Bushra. I met her and her son Mohammed this day last week. There are currently ten families still awaiting reunification with their children and siblings. I met this young boy last week who had lost his leg in an Israeli airstrike and lost his father in that same airstrike. His mother came here with him to seek medical care through the medical evacuations but he was split from his three siblings who are orphaned in the Gaza Strip and who are receiving some basic care from their 81-year-old grandmother who is not in a position to care for them.”
“That can often increase their likelihood of inflicting violence. It does not happen for everyone, but it happens in certain conditions. Shame and humiliation are a core driver of violence. When people commit violence as adults we lock them in prison and deny them the victimhood of what happened to them during childhood. We will never fully address what happened if we do not fully acknowledge all the different core drivers of how people's lives are impacted and how it manifests in the world. I thank the Minister. I hope she will take on board some of Inclusion Ireland's recommendations on the terms of reference so we can address the cohort of people who are the most vulnerable in this conversation, that is those who went to special schools.”
“Imagine if we looked at a person who has experienced sexual abuse and we were able to map out how many experiences or lives had been affected by that person's experience of sexual abuse, by how it affected that person's relationships with other people, how it affected that person's children and how it affected how the person engaged with and trusted systems, teachers and so on. The experience ripples out and has a much wider impact than we can imagine. We need to make sure that where it is having those other impacts, we are including the other spaces where people end up. A core driver of violence is shame and humiliation. One really good way of shaming and humiliating people is to take from them and use their bodies in a warped way. They have to feel that shame and hold it forever.”
“It is beyond comprehension that we are looking at what has passed and we are not making sure our current systems are completely trauma-informed and survivor-led, regardless of whether someone is in prison for another issue. Lots of survivors of sexual abuse are currently in the prison system, as are children of those who have survived sexual abuse. Over the years I have read about studies that say up to six people are affected by each suicide. That is a low number. It is not accurate, but I think that research is from the 1970s. Other researchers and academics came along and looked at the impact of suicide and found that it is actually much broader than that. It can affect up to 130 people in a community, which is evident in suicide clusters and such things.”
“Can the Minister imagine being a man in there engaged in an Open University who has moved on to progression and is addressing the psychology, doing all of that, and then he is told his place in the progression unit is gone because sex offenders are going to be put in there? His school experience was completely marred, destroyed and his life was affected forever. He spiralled into addiction and criminality. He has finally engaged in school, albeit in a place where there is a deprivation of liberty - it is not ideal; of course you would want it to be in another way - and now he has been told that although it might not involve the person who abused him, his full-time school and the progression unit is being taken away and sex offenders are being put there, while he will go back to the main jail.”
“There is something about a point in history that makes it seem that this is gone and done. Abuse is still happening in places of detention, care facilities and in other ways. We need to acknowledge that. The Minister was Minister for Justice previously. When we look at the progression unit, there are men I work with in the prisons who have experienced sexual abuse, who will now be vilified for the lives they went on to live from that and denied their experiences of what happened beforehand that led to that. Some of the men were in the progression unit and it was taken over to house sex offenders.”
“Such a response is needed there to make sure we can support that cohort. Is the Minister open to amending those terms of reference to reflect that need? The reason I walk back from my experience is I was an adult with a voice. I was able to create a frame in my head that allowed me to live with something and accept the decisions or non-decisions I made in the moment. However, if we walk back to being a child, and being a child with a very particular set of needs, it brings us to a whole new place of what is needed in terms of a response and a system. Beyond the schools and in terms of boarding and day boarding, we even have to look at our current settings. When we think of historical, we sometimes think there will hopefully be a time when this is over.”
“That is why it is incredibly important that we listen to Inclusion Ireland when it talks about the terms of reference in relation to the commission and that when we look at where the abuse happened in special schools, those accommodation rights that may be needed for intellectual disabilities are recognised within the terms of reference to make sure that cohort of people can engage in a way that is going to meet that very particular set of needs. Inclusion Ireland also spoke about the need for legal representation as a form of support for survivors and stipulated commission reports must be published in accessible formats. There are many recommendations and my question to the Minister is, how are we ensuring there is a very particular type of response to that cohort of people that already has certain abilities or disabilities in the world?”
“A large number of those kids with intellectual disabilities are approximately 4.6 times more likely to be abused within schools. Imagine being part that cohort, where so many of a person’s functions may already need additional support from the systems and people around him or her, and he or she never gains that voice or way to communicate what happened to him or her. You never get to actually say the words of the depravity and what was taken from you or what was done to you in that moment.”
“I cannot imagine layering that on to an experience. Where I got really stuck over the past few days was imagining being in a special school and being a wheelchair user or non-verbal with an intellectual disability. What does the adult packaging in my head of my system choosing fly or freeze, mean for a child, especially a child with an additional set of needs who cannot even communicate in the moment, a way to understand what is happening, never mind when he or she is talking to his or her parents? We talk about the power and liberation of being able to give voice to your story and experience but what if you can never talk? What if you are part of that cohort of the 25% of allegations of abuse that happened in special schools?”
“In my response to that, I was able to package it in a way of asking myself why I did not fight; why I froze. You berate yourself for freezing and not fighting, because that seems like it is more of an act of taking some sort of power, and that freezing is powerless. Over time you think that actually, since the beginning of time our systems and human make-up have particular ways to protect us and for us to survive. As an adult, I can take in that while experiencing something, my system decided in that moment the safest thing to do was to freeze, and that was going to get me out of the situation quicker and without any violence, potentially. I take that another step and imagine being a child, when one is told to respect teachers and peers and the church, and that they know best, and that they are there to mind you and to keep you safe.”
“It is incredibly difficult and it is something I always get quite nervous about discussing, because we often try to distance ourselves from the reality of what might have happened to someone so we can speak about it. However, to be human, we often then have to try to sit still with it for a moment and think about what that must have been like and what impact it must have had. When we let that in, our defences drop a little bit and then it is really difficult to come in and put that into the Chamber. While I was thinking about it, I was thinking about how as an adult, I spoke about being raped in my 20s. That is obviously not the same as predatory child sexual abuse but I think about the human psychology in how I came to terms with my response to that.”
“I thank the Minister and I broadly welcome the commission and the Minister’s statement. It feels as though we are having the same conversation over and over again, which is incredibly difficult because language, processes and talk and the way we have to then package it, for example, in a commission or the steps we need to take, never fully feel like they match the reality of the situation of people's lives. It is as though we take either an academic language or political understanding and we layer on our own ways of talking about something that is actually quite sick. They often feel so far apart. We question how we can do justice to the experiences of people the moment somebody else who has not experientially had that experience tries to put language on top of it.”
“I wanted to put on record the situation with regard to the GAA Palestine Group and the Lajee children's choir group, who are awaiting communication on applications that are sitting on an Irish desk, and the 40 students who will not be able to start their studies here in Ireland in September if we do not move on this in the next couple of weeks.”
“They are being told that they cannot apply for a visa until the evacuation process has been dealt with. Even if that does get dealt with, visas will not be in place to enable them to move swiftly and get on the evacuation list in the first place. Several blockages relating to several different groups seem to be happening all at once. We need to write to the Department of foreign affairs to get an insight into what it is doing to open up additional diplomatic channels in order to resolve these blockages and give full realisation to our solidarity with the Palestinian community, not just in words but in actions too.”
“I understand that Ireland is potentially experiencing some level of international isolation in regard to its support for and continued solidarity with the Palestinian community. I am not usually one for paranoia but it feels like something is happening in relation to groups seeking visas. Perhaps the issue lies with the Israeli Embassy and relationships have broken down there. Why are applications that have not yet had a decision made on them sitting on desks in the context of trips that are due to take place soon? Forty students who have received places in Irish universities cannot get evacuation flights to come here. We are just coming into the summer now and the academic year starts straight after that but there are students who cannot even apply for their visas.”
“I wish to speak about a number of different Palestinian groups. Some have been spoken about already. I am talking about the members of the Palestinian GAA team in relation to their trip to Ireland, but also in relation to the Lajee choir group. Currently, they have had to cancel their trip to Ireland, a trip they were very much looking forward to. The word from Tel Aviv is that what seems to have happened is that the application forms are just sitting here in Ireland. The visa applications are basically sitting on a desk in Ireland waiting for approval. The parents of the children who were due to come here provided their passports and they still have not got those passports back, months later.”
“I move amendment No. 10: In page 25, after line 37, to insert the following: “Report on provision of supports to bereaved children 22. The Minister shall, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas regarding the adequacy of supports provided to bereaved children, with particular reference to the children of lone-parent families, where a child’s parents were not married, in a civil partnership, or cohabiting on the date of death of the bereaved parent.”. I am going to withdraw the amendment based on the Minister's commitment to engage on the topic.”
“I move amendment No. 9: In page 16, between lines 20 and 21, to insert the following: “(b) the date on which the youngest child of shared parentage reaches the age of 18, or the age of 22 where the child is receiving full-time education,”.”
“I move amendment No. 5: In page 12, between lines 37 and 38, to insert the following: “(b) the date on which the youngest child of shared parentage reaches the age of 18, or the age of 22 where the child is receiving full-time education,”.”
“I move amendment No. 3: In page 6, between lines 20 and 21, to insert the following: “(b) the date on which the youngest child of shared parentage reaches the age of 18, or the age of 22 where the child is receiving full-time education,”. I am going to actually withdraw these amendments. They are consequential on the amendments that were ruled out of order, so they do not make sense on their own. I will refrain from speaking to them.”
“There are some great measures within that Bill that would also be helpful to the discussion if we were ever to look at a social welfare intervention for those children. There are some mechanisms within that which could also be applied to another piece of social welfare legislation on child poverty. I would very much welcome the opportunity to engage with the officials who are working on that.”
“I would love the opportunity to engage on the child poverty measures because it could nearly be linked to people who went through the Revenue assessment tool as well. There is already a fair assessment of maintenance and you could nearly build on that. If you are part of that system and a parent dies and that money is taken directly from the family, there would already be a State system that has begun to assess. We took the tool from New Zealand and undertook a huge piece of research on the care cost percentage as well as the percentage of raising the child. There is the care cost and then there is the actual monetary cost. Those two are put into a mathematical tool which it is beyond me to fully explain right now. I would need to teach it to myself again every morning if I am going to speak to it.”
“I thank the Minister. It is also worth noting that in the next term, there will be a piece of legislation that has taken me five or six years to draft because it became so complicated and just kept getting bigger and bigger. It is the child maintenance legislation which would be placed within Revenue rather than an independent agency, which we have seen potentially would not work in terms of which Department would be responsible. We have spent five years developing it and it would actually the place the voluntary mechanism in terms of assessment within Revenue and we have interlinked how that interlinks with the courts, cases currently before the court, enforcement and taken at source, etc.”
“I ask the Minister to consider this amendment with some of those frames in mind when we move forward about how we make this legislation be completely linked to and led by children’s needs. The fact is, we are still having a conversation around children’s needs, payments and social welfare schemes based on the relationship of two parents to each other rather than what the individual child needs throughout their lives to be able to flourish and succeed in a hard situation where they have lost one parent. It is important, at least, to not put another burden on them when they are not getting any support from the State just because their parents, through no fault of their own, had no long-term relationship or connection to each other legally in terms of marriage.”
“We very much have conversations around Children First, but single mothers and children in single-parent households have not featured much with regard to how we financially protect those families and children. I knew the other amendments would be ruled out because they would create a cost on the State to include more cohorts. However, we will leave many children behind. There could be a payment until the age of 18, or it could be explored within a report, in the context of this Bill. Unlike a widower’s pension that would exist across a lifetime, it could be something that exists across the financial needs of the child until they are a particular age, rather than it being a payment attached to an individual forever. We need to look at the whole family and make sure we are not compounding situations of poverty for very at-risk families.”
“My amendment seeks to o broaden the discussion even more beyond divorce and cohabiting, and placing it firmly back in the conversation of children’s rights and what children need. If a report was to be done on it, we would look at whether it would be means tested, for example. There could be multiple children in two different families with the same father or the same mother, but that does not mean that those children’s needs are any less. We are now creating a way we can include more families, but we are leaving potentially the most vulnerable families behind, which are often those single-parent households where cohabitation never existed and marriage never existed at all. I hope the Minister considers this. It is not a new lens to look as we have the O’Meara case, the Constitution and Children First legislation.”
“Even though the relationship may not have existed for long enough for it to even be considered as a cohabiting one, the maintenance goes towards ensuring a child does not experience any consistent poverty. You remove the emotional labour of the other parent, regardless of relationship, and now the financial piece is removed as well. Currently, no discussion is happening whether it is on pensions or bereaved partners, wives or husbands on the surviving parent. Why are we not looking at the surviving parent? Why are we not creating some sort of mechanism that the financial support for a child happens because he or she is a bereaved child? He or she is a child who has been left more vulnerable due to the absence of one parent, both emotionally and financially, with regard to what this Bill looks for.”
“There are parents who have never maintained a relationship with the other parent of their child, but that does not mean they do not co-parent. They might never have been in a committed relationship. Children from a very brief relationship, for example, a one-night stand or a year-long relationship, do not currently feature in the debate at all. If anything, they are at the most risk of poverty, especially if we look at Ireland's child maintenance system. If a child's father is paying the mother €50 a week in maintenance, it makes a huge difference to someone on social welfare or in a low-skilled manual job. Unfortunately, I have many friends whose children's fathers died in various ways, including suicide.”
“Some of my amendments were ruled out of order, which I kind of expected, but this amendment is similar in nature to Sinn Féin's amendment, one that I will be supporting. It relates to a report on the provision of supports to bereaved children. For as long as I have been elected, and prior to that, I have spoken about how single parents are viewed in the country historically. We had a referendum last year in which we debated mothers and Article 14.1, yet we are still talking about the protection of children being based on the relationship of their parents, whether it be divorced, cohabiting or married. What we have seen from the O'Meara case is the explicit reference that children should not be penalised because their parents are not married. Children should not be penalised, regardless of the relationship of their parents in its totality.”
“Baked into legislation is a protection for the church by way of survivors not being able to take a case against the church. The legislation gives cover to the church because the waivers do not relate only to taking a case against the State. Legislation should concern State schemes and what funding the State puts in. It should not deal with what is coming from the church's coffers. I accept that the Minister cannot make a decision unilaterally to make this provision but the fact it did not form the basis of the development of the legislation is problematic in and of itself. That is why I am seeking a report to look at how we can correct the use of waivers and, later, gagging orders.”
“When a person is at a point of absolute trauma, with everything being on the TV for the first time and the whole country talking about something, the person's needs are sometimes so high it is like a power imbalance and coercion happens, in that, we will only give people this thing to meet their needs if their sign to say they cannot take a case against us if they at some stage do not feel that this was an adequate or true representation of what they had experienced at the hands of the State or the church. The State has baked into this legislation a protection for the church because some of those waivers were directly related to speaking out against the church. Some waivers covered church and State, some were State alone, and some just the church.”
“We can use new legislation to do keyhole surgery on other legislation to be able to repeal sections. Later on, we will talk about the gagging order and people not being able speak publicly about what was in their applications. There is no reason we cannot go through one Act to improve what was bad legislation that cut off recourse for people if they were unhappy with the redress they received. Lots of people at the time would have signed to say they would not take a case against the State and sue.”
“So, given the fact that the waiver is implied, it is part of this scheme and should form part of the discussion. It has been raised time and again as an issue for people in terms of what we have learned and what has worked. It is basically a contract. For a contract to stand, we are able to legislate to be able to remove the legality of having such a waiver in the first place. It creates a system that is completely unequal because it lets into it people who had signed a waiver whereas some others had not, but if they did not meet the conditions of the redress scheme, they will not even get to this point of the legislation because the schemes are so linked to each other. There are different types of people with different conditions attached to them to be able to access this, so waivers should have been a central part of the discussion.”
“The Minister said that removing the use of waivers was a Government decision. This is Government legislation. It is not unusual for us to look to a Minister who is taking responsibility for a Department, and who is in government and bringing Government legislation, and make the assumption that there would be conversations and decisions made by the Government around whether using a waiver is appropriate within this legislation. The Minister is saying that some people will have signed a waiver to be part of the redress scheme. Is she saying there were people who got payments from Caranua who did not meet the redress scheme's criteria in terms of having signed a waiver? Are we saying that some people who can access this have a waiver and some do not?”
“It was like it was some sort of additional benefit from the State, like a bonus or something for them to enjoy when they were actually applying to Caranua to be able to meet their needs and get what they needed. Obviously, Caranua was set up to deal with a person's ongoing needs. Those ongoing needs can change and grow, depending on the person's age and circumstances. I ask the Minister that we clarify that waivers are needed for this Bill. It is important that is corrected from last week. I hope the Minister will consider this amendment, which will give us greater insight into the impact of those waivers and the adequacy of healthcare, educational and financial supports, and look at the recommendations for best practice going forward.”
“At the start of this week, I went back on old communications I received and one of the pieces of communication about the cut-off point from Caranua to a survivor in essence said - I paraphrase because I am worried I will not get it word for word - we were happy to be able to provide you with whatever supports, and it mentions the cut-off point. The final line, which was the most worrying in it, was we hope you are happy with the benefits of what we have given you. We hope you are happy with the benefits of what we are giving you as if it was some sort of gift from the pocket of Caranua and this person had not been through horrific circumstances.”
“Waivers apply because we are not carving out a space where anyone who did not sign waivers can come into the scheme at this point. It is important to say this Bill includes waivers because they are actually baked into the very criteria by means of which somebody was able to go through the process from start to finish in the first place. I ask the Minister to consider this amendment so we can at least look at the use of waivers within those schemes, their appropriateness and the appropriateness of the supports. I understand that some people will say that a waiver from being able to sue the State is in place but we have to remember that many survivors who went through the scheme, especially in Caranua, were not happy with the support they received from it.”
“For that reason and because of the ruling of that amendment out of order, this applies more than ever in terms of reviewing the use of waivers within the report. Last week, the Minister stated that waivers were not required in this legislation. When I reflected on this when I went home, I realised there was something not sitting right with me at the time. Waivers actually apply because you have to sign a waiver to be able to apply to the redress board. You have to have met the criteria for the redress board to be able to apply to Caranua. I do not think is accurate to say that waivers do not apply for this Bill because the waiver is already in place. You cannot apply for this scheme unless you meet the criteria of the redress board, and therefore Caranua and therefore this.”
“I know it is not the Minister who rules amendments out of order, but one of the later amendments makes the use of waivers illegal and provides that they would no longer apply. When we get to that stage, I guess it would be implied that there would be a cost to the State. However, that cost to the State is seen through a crystal ball or based on a hypothetical that somebody would take a case but nobody may ever take a case. An amendment on whether a waiver should apply has been ruled out of order on the basis of guesswork that there would be a potential cost, which is very different from the establishment of an office or service or the hiring of an employee or civil servant. It is a hypothetical scenario where a survivor may take a case.”
“This amendment seeks to oblige the Minister to prepare a report on the adequacy of supports provided to survivors of residential institutional abuse through Caranua; examine the use of waivers in the redress schemes that allowed residents of those institutions to access supports; examine the general appropriateness of the criteria for survivors' qualification for supports; and make recommendations for best practice to be applied for any future redress schemes. We have submitted amendments specifically to address the adequacy of healthcare supports, the use of waivers and the appropriateness of the criteria. I will address those issues in relation to the relevant amendments. Unfortunately, some of our later amendments about waivers were ruled out of order. Obviously, this amendment speaks to waivers so I will speak to that somewhat.”
“This amendment is related to but an amended version of the amendment we tabled on Committee Stage looking for a report to be drawn up. We have further refined the proposal to be specific to Caranua so that it does not take in other institutions. To paraphrase, the response was that the Minister cannot take in a report that takes in other institutions. This is a new amendment to take that comment into account.”
“I move amendment No. 6: In page 9, between lines 28 and 29, to insert the following: “Report on Caranua 7. The Minister shall, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, lay a report before both Houses of the Oireachtas reviewing the functions of Caranua, examining, inter alia: (a) the adequacy of healthcare, educational and financial supports provided to survivors; (b) the use of waivers; (c) the appropriateness of criteria for survivors’ qualification for supports; (d) recommendations for best practice going forward in relation to any future redress schemes.”.”
“2, and "no application has been made under subsection (1) for a period of not less than three years", the Minister may "by order, appoint a day on which this subsection shall cease to have effect". Is that just that the review will cease to exist or will the fund itself cease to exist?”