‘Tuam redress is already too late for my ailing mum’
THE son of a Tuam mother and baby home survivor who turned 91 this week has said it is now too late for his mother and aunt – who both have dementia – to enjoy their compensation package when it finally comes.
Thomas Garavan, a professor of leadership practice at University College Cork, questioned the delay on the ‘mean-spirited’ redress scheme, which was signed into law last summer after years of campaigning but still hasn’t opened for applications.
Mr Garavan’s mother Margaret was one of seven siblings taken from his married but poor grandparents between 1934 and 1940 and sent to the Tuam home.
The children were kept separate as they grew up in the home and with foster families and not told of each other’s existence.
Mr Garavan eventually tracked them all down over the decades, with some incredulous they had siblings.
He said the compensation – and the acknowledgment of wrongdoing that it represents – could not now be properly appreciated by his mother when it finally arrives.
Mr Garavan told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Two or three years ago, yes, but not now. Two years ago, she said to me: “Will I ever get any compensation at all? Will I be alive to enjoy it, or will it help me to live the last of my days?”
‘The place was so cold, the food was terrible’
‘But now she won’t understand it. So the only benefit of it is that it would help us to keep her in the nursing home and give her the care she needs.’
He said his mother ‘felt a stigma all her life about the fact that she was in a mother and baby home’.
Families of survivors of the State institutions will still be able to apply for compensation, where eligible, if their loved one dies, but Mr Garavan said: ‘These people would like to get it while they are alive.’
Mr Garavan’s aunt Mary has ‘some limited recollection’ of her three years in Tuam home, he said.
‘They were hungry all the time when they were in there. They had very poor clothes. They were all marched down to school in the morning when everybody else had gone in.
‘And she remembers when she soiled her pants or something like that getting a chastisement from one of the nuns in charge.’
His mother was in the Tuam home at the same time as her little brother but didn’t know he was there as there were male and female sections.
‘Basically all my mother kept telling me was the place was so cold, the food was terrible, they were treated terribly.
‘They were only allowed out to play for certain times and the clothes they wore were just dreadful.’
However, it was the periods in which they were boarded out to foster families that have left the biggest scars on the women.
‘My aunt was fostered out to a home where she was raped at 12 and pregnant at 13. And she had to be taken out of there and put into another home.
‘And my mother was literally a skivvy. She was a farm hand in effect, even though she went to school,’ he said.
‘The couple that she went out to work for were a childless couple and they literally treated her as a skivvy.’
The two sisters were ‘very optimistic’ when the redress scheme was first mooted, Mr Garavan said.
The ‘real hardship’ of their situation, he added, was the fact they didn’t know about their family, were lied to about their existence and then stonewalled when attempting to find out about them.
‘My mother knew about [Mary] just because they had a chance meeting in the same town that they were fostered in, but they were fostered to different families.
‘Then there was another sister who was fostered out in the same town as well. But they never knew about their three brothers.
‘[Margaret] was in her early 60s When she found out that our mother was still alive and was living in Ballina, but her mother was ill at that stage,’ he said.
Mr Garavan, over decades, managed to track down their brothers in the UK and the US.
‘I only found them 10 years ago and all three of them have died since. So it’s all very sad.
‘They never had a relationship with their brothers. They didn’t know about them.’
The academic said many people had ‘hellish’ experiences when they were boarded out, ‘used as farm hands and treated abominably’.
‘The State was responsible from day one, and yet the paltry amount of compensation that they give is very, very poor.’
And though it doesn’t affect his family, the fact the redress scheme excludes people who spent less than six months in a home is ‘totally objectionable, unfair, unjust, inequitable [and] lacking in any sense of compassion’ to the experiences people had while in the homes or with foster families.
From his own experience trying to track down family members, he said records in Tuam mother and baby home – and presumably others – are inaccurate and incomplete. ‘In the case of my aunt who is deceased, they have wrong records for her because I found out that the records they had weren’t accurate,’ he said.
‘I think that could present problems because I’m not too sure that the nuns in Tuam home kept very good records.’
Around 34,000 people will be eligible to apply for compensation under the redress scheme and around 24,000 survivors are excluded. It is estimated to cost around €800m
In response to queries from the MoS, a spokesman for the Department of Children said the redress scheme will open before April.
The spokesman said that a ‘comprehensive body of work has been undertaken’ to get the scheme up and running, including making ‘the necessary regulations which must be in place prior to the Scheme opening’, recruiting and training staff, developing both ‘hard copy’ and online application systems, developing IT infrastructure and preparing a public awareness campaign.
‘Opening the Scheme as soon as possible is an absolute priority for Minister [Roderic] O’Gorman and for the Government, and the Scheme will open within the first quarter of this year,’ the spokesman said.
‘Three have died since, it’s all very sad’