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Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report

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Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report Draft Alternative Executive Summary UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL JULY 14 2021, 09:00 DRAFT - DO NOT QUOTE OR CITE WITHOUT EDITORS’ PERMISSION July 13 2021 Foreword .............................................................................................................................................................. 3 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................................... 5 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 7 1.1 Human Rights: Summary of Findings .................................................................................................. 10 2. Unmarried Motherhood in Context ............................................................................................................ 14 2.1 Concealment ............................................................................................................................................ 14 2.2 Impacts of the Law on Illegitimacy ....................................................................................................... 15 2.3 Natural Fathers ........................................................................................................................................ 17 2.4 Profit and Responsibility ........................................................................................................................ 18 3. In the Institutions. .......................................................................................................................................... 21 3.1. Governance and Responsibility ............................................................................................................ 21 3.2 Social Welfare .......................................................................................................................................... 24 3.3 Unpaid Labour ........................................................................................................................................ 27 3.4 Admissions and Detention ..................................................................................................................... 29 3.5 Admissions and Sexual Abuse .............................................................................................................. 33 3.6 Inhuman and Degrading Treatment ..................................................................................................... 35 3.7 Deaths and Burials .................................................................................................................................. 37 3.8 Obstetric Violence ................................................................................................................................... 40 3.9 Vaccine and Milk Trials .......................................................................................................................... 42 4. Family Separation .......................................................................................................................................... 44 4.1 Harms of Family Separation .................................................................................................................. 45 4.2 Domestic Adoption ................................................................................................................................. 48 4.3 Intercountry Adoption ........................................................................................................................... 52 5. Discrimination ................................................................................................................................................ 54 5.1 Race ........................................................................................................................................................... 54 5.2 Disability .................................................................................................................................................. 57 5.3 Travellers .................................................................................................................................................. 58 5.4 Religion ..................................................................................................................................................... 60 6. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................... 62 7. Clann Recommendations for Action ........................................................................................................... 67 8.Notes on Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 69 8.1 Process and Motivation .......................................................................................................................... 69 8.2 What are the Limitations of this Document? ....................................................................................... 69 8.3 Language .................................................................................................................................................. 71 8.4 Voice .......................................................................................................................................................... 72 8.5 Testimony before the Confidential Committee: Law and Oral Testimony ..................................... 75 1 8.6 Our Approach to Oral Evidence ........................................................................................................... 78 8.7 A Feminist Rights-based Analysis ........................................................................................................ 81 8.7 Law in Context ........................................................................................................................................ 82 8.8 Law and Time .......................................................................................................................................... 83 2 FOREWORD This document is written in solidarity with all those, in Ireland and overseas, who experienced human rights violations in the ‘mother and baby homes’ and associated institutions, or whose rights were violated by the wider system of family separation of which those institutions were a part. Affected people include women who were separated from their children, people adopted, fostered and ‘boarded out’ from the institutions, their parents, siblings and wider families. They also include women and children who died in the institutions, and those sent from one institution to another; perhaps a laundry, a psychiatric hospital or an industrial school. Many affected people have campaigned for decades so that their experiences could receive a full public hearing. This project is inspired by their refusal to let the State control their personal narratives, and public understanding of Ireland’s national history. We are academic specialists in human rights law, family law, criminal justice, equalities, social welfare law, legal history and histories of institutionalisation. This document is our ‘rapid response’ to the 2021 Final Report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation (‘the Report’). We have rewritten the Report’s Executive Summary. This document is intended to be read as an alternative Executive Summary to the Report. References in footnotes, unless otherwise stated are to that Report. Inline references in brackets –- e.g. (1.1) - are to numbered sections of this document. Our ‘rewrite’ is not comprehensive. It concentrates on the aspects of the Executive Summary that are most relevant to a legal analysis. Unlike the original Executive Summary, it is organised by legal topic and by type of rights violation. This means that this document may address issues in a different order to the original Report. It also means that it connects issues drawn from across several different chapters of the Report. We have not taken account of any of the many developments since the Report was published in writing Sections 1-6, though we have reflected on some in Section 8. We have not, and cannot, gather new evidence or new personal testimony. We have rewritten the Executive Summary because it is the section of the Report that most people have read, and it is the section that outlines the Commission’s findings. We are concerned that the findings do not fully reflect the evidence presented in the main body of the Report and often minimise the State’s current obligations to those affected by mass ‘historical’ abuses. Re-writing the Executive Summary also allowed us to respond relatively quickly alongside our ordinary academic workloads. Of course, as is evident from our footnotes, in re-writing the Executive Summary, we examined the Report thoroughly and as a whole. For a more detailed explanation of how this document was written and why, please see the ‘Notes on Methodology’ (Section 8 of this document). Many questions about the limitations of this document, and about why we have adopted certain kinds of language or taken a particular approach to evidence are answered there. The Report itself does not include a substantive discussion
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