Debate contribution: Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) and Redress Scheme Bill: Further Consideration Stage

Debate contribution by Ms Paula Bradshaw on 22 June 2026.

MLA

Ms Paula Bradshaw

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

22 June 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) and Redress Scheme Bill: Further Consideration Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5638685

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I will first address the Committee amendment in the group and then summarise the Committee's engagement on the other amendments. The Committee tabled one amendment — amendment No 11 — to clause 32, which sets out who is entitled to a redress payment. It is an extremely important provision in this significant Bill. I remind the House that the response to the Committee's call for evidence demonstrated strong opposition to the proposed posthumous cut-off date of 29 September 2011. Throughout Committee Stage, victims and survivors consistently advocated either an earlier date or the removal of the cut-off date entirely to ensure a more inclusive approach. The exclusion of posthumous claims prior to 2011 was described as arbitrary and unjustified, creating harmful hierarchies among victims and survivors. Following the Committee's amendment to remove the posthumous cut-off date not being selected for debate at Consideration Stage, the Committee sought, ahead of Further Consideration Stage, legal advice on the robustness of an amendment that would change the date of 29 September 2011 to 28 April 1953. On the basis of that legal advice, the Committee was confident that an amendment to clause 32(6)(b) to change the posthumous date from 29 September 2011 to 28 April 1953 would be legally secure. Noting the Speaker's remarks in the Assembly on Tuesday 2 June, the Committee wrote to the Department on 3 June to ask Ministers to consider tabling an amendment to that effect. As the Executive Office did not subsequently table an amendment on the posthumous date, the Committee considered that it had an obligation to table such an amendment itself. The Committee chose the date because it reflects the posthumous eligibility cut-off date used in the redress scheme for survivors of historical institutional abuse (HIA). The date was adopted on the basis that it marks the point at which concerns were first formally raised by the Northern Ireland Government's Ministry of Home Affairs through a memorandum about conditions in such institutions, which were therefore known to the state. Birth Mothers and their Children for Justice also proposed the date as an alternative, should the posthumous cut-off date not be entirely removed, as it aligns with the April 1953 precedent set by the historical institutional abuse inquiry. The Committee formally agreed the amendment at its meeting on Tuesday 16 June 2026. The DUP opposed the change in the posthumous date, and it is for those members to set out the reasons for their position. The amendment tabled by the Committee strengthens the clause by broadening the eligibility for a redress payment. By addressing the issue of a posthumous cut-off date, the amendment ensures that individuals who may have been excluded previously are now potentially included in the scope of the redress scheme. That will result in improved fairness and widen access to redress for victims and survivors and their families. In particular, the amendment responds directly to the concerns raised by victims and survivors, thereby promoting a more inclusive and fair approach. It helps to ensure that entitlement is not arbitrarily limited by a restrictive date, especially in circumstances where the harms in question were known to the state for a much longer period. The Committee welcomes the majority of the amendments in the group, which were tabled to offer tidying-up refinements or alternatives to a number of Gerry Carroll's successful amendments at Consideration Stage. The Committee wrote to the Department on 3 June 2026 about those amendments and asked the Executive Office to engage further with the Member on the technical wording and to consider how the amendments might be strengthened in line with the policy intent. The Committee held an additional meeting on Tuesday 16 June 2026, at which TEO officials shared the amendments ahead of their being formally tabled. The Committee welcomed and appreciated the responsiveness to that request. The Committee also wrote to the First Minister and deputy First Minister to seek their views on Gerry Carroll's new amendments to clause 32 and how they would operate in practice if selected for debate and made by the Assembly. In particular, the Committee requested further detail on how the truth recovery redress scheme would differentiate between individuals placed in workhouses for reasons other than pregnancy and those who were placed there due to being pregnant. A response was received from Ministers this morning that raised several concerns about the practicality, fairness and legislative competence of Mr Carroll's amendments. Given that it was received only this morning, the Committee has not been able to discuss or agree a Committee position on those matters. Hopefully, the junior Ministers can speak to the issues in more detail and provide clarity on any concerns raised during the debate. Finally, I thank again the departmental officials, the Committee team and the Bill Clerk for their work in advance of Further Consideration Stage. The Committee looks forward to the legislation moving one step closer to completing its legislative passage through the Assembly. I will now make a number of remarks in my capacity as an MLA. I am so pleased that Committee amendment No 11 was selected for debate today. I firmly believe that immeasurable hurt and pain will be caused to the birth mothers, the adult adoptees and their families should the original posthumous date of 29 September 2011 remain in the Bill when it passes into law. Straight after the Consideration Stage debate, along with my Alliance Party colleague Stewart Dickson, I submitted a placeholder amendment for a fresh posthumous date of 1 January 1996 to the Bill Office. In so doing, we wanted to send a signal to the Speaker's Office, the Executive Office and the Bill Office that, for us, the issue was not going to go away. We were willing to work with anyone and everyone to get a fresh date that worked and on which there was broad consensus. I thank all the victims and survivors who have engaged with me over the past few weeks to ensure that they understood the process and why we as a Committee were moving forward with a new date of 28 April 1953. People will know that I did not want to see a posthumous date in the Bill at all. As far as I am concerned, an acknowledgement redress scheme based on admission should acknowledge every pregnant woman and girl and the children who experienced abuse in such institutions. Mr Deputy Speaker, with your indulgence, I will read into the record part of an email that MLAs received in the last few days from Mr Mark McCollum. It is such a powerful email, yet it is drafted in such easy language that it allows us all to grasp the full impact that such institutions had on birth mothers and adult adoptees and the cultural and societal norms that existed at that time.

Mr McCollum included a photograph of his mother in his email. His mother was called Kathleen McGuire. He wrote:

"She was a wee Derry girl with a cheeky smile. She was someone's daughter. Someone's sister. Someone's friend. She had hopes, dreams and plans for her future. Like so many young women of her generation, those hopes and dreams were overtaken by circumstances beyond her control. At twenty years of age, she became pregnant with me. She spent more than six months in Marionvale Mother and Baby Home. She gave birth to me there. She cared for me during my first weeks of life. Then I was taken from her. When I was born, my mother named me Paul Anthony McGuire. That was the first gift she ever gave me. A name. An identity. A connection to her. A connection to my family. A connection to where I came from. That was taken from me as well. My name was changed. My identity was altered. My history was hidden. My mother returned to Derry carrying a loss that remained with her for the rest of her life. I grew up in Donegal knowing nothing about her story. She spent years trying to find me. I spent years not knowing she was looking. By the time I finally uncovered the truth, she had died. Kathleen McGuire died in 2000 at just fifty-four years of age. She never got the chance to know that her son had found her. She never got the chance to tell her story."

I have been working with the campaigners for the past 10 years, and I know that they have been campaigning since long before that. I do not have any statistical evidence for this, but I will make an observation from my engagement with those campaigners and hearing their personal stories. To pick up on the point from Mark's email about his mother dying at 54 years of age, I have spoken to many adult adoptees whose mothers died at a relatively young age. In my opinion, those premature deaths were a direct consequence of the trauma that those mothers experienced in the institutions and the lifelong pain that they have had to endure having had their children taken away from them by such a cruel and heartless system. It is my opinion that the existing posthumous date was not based on trauma-informed policymaking. Those birth mothers who are still living have been able to fill in and augment for me the picture of how their lives were irreparably changed. The Committee heard from one birth mother who said that she was afraid to take her subsequent children to a GP whenever they were sick for fear that she would be blamed for their illness, deemed to be an unfit mother and have her other children taken away from her. Imagine having to live with such a lifelong mistrust of people in authority — in the healthcare profession, for example — and positions of influence in our communities. The trauma will have lived in every fibre in their body. In every decision that they have taken as a mother, the trauma will live with them forever. On a slightly lighter note, I had a conversation with a birth mother who was able to get her child back and who went on to marry the father of her child. That is a unique outcome. She had two further children and said that she did not feel that she should be eligible for a redress payment. I said to her that her children got a different version of her as their mother than the one who they might have had, had she not experienced the trauma of living and giving birth in one of the institutions and then had to fight for years to get her child back. On reflection, she agreed. That is why the posthumous date matters. The redress scheme, whether applied for directly or as a posthumous payment, is there to acknowledge the trauma, which, as I said, will have attacked every fibre of their being, every day since their experience in those institutions. It will have shaped the rest of their lives. We need to look at it in the round: not just at what happened in the institutions but at how that followed them after that. For me, it would be simply intolerable to draw a line between those who are eligible and those who are not. At the Committee meeting at which we discussed this amendment and our previous amendment, the DUP representatives voted against it. Their votes are recorded in the Committee Stage report and the relevant minutes. I totally respect their democratic right to do that and know the reasons that they are opposed to the new posthumous date, but I appeal to the DUP not to vote against our Committee amendment today. To them I say: you can make your views known in your contributions, but please abstain. Please do not put the amendment to a vote. I believe that we have the numbers in the Chamber to pass the amendment, and I implore the DUP not to force a Division, for it will cause unnecessary pain and hurt to those who are in the Gallery and who are watching online. Before I move on to Gerry Carroll's amendments, I draw the Executive Office officials' attention to the Bill that Ivana Bachik — I might have mispronounced that.

Thank you so much. She is the Labour Party TD in the Dáil who has introduced the Civil Liability (Child Sexual Abuse Proceedings Against Unincorporated Bodies of Persons) Bill. It is about compelling religious orders to share in contributions towards redress, such as the HIA redress scheme. They have evaded payment and hid behind legal and financial barriers in not coming forward, and Executive Office officials should watch closely what they do in the Republic to force the hand of those religious orders. Turning to the amendments in the name of Gerry Carroll, I fully understand and am fully sympathetic to them. He is trying to create provisions whereby a person who was admitted to one of the workhouses and then fell pregnant should be eligible for redress. The fundamental issue is that the redress scheme is based on admission. Women and men, the latter not always pregnant, were admitted to workhouses for a wide range of issues, including destitution and healthcare. Under the proposed redress scheme, it is not possible to distinguish those who were admitted for one from the other. That is why the Committee looked at the issue in great detail. We took a lot of evidence and spent a lot of time grappling with it, but we have left it to the public inquiry to make those recommendations to the redress scheme to expedite the inclusion of any institution, body or facility where the evidence presents itself. The Committee suggested that the inquiry should be conducted in a modular form so that the inquiry panel does not have to wait until the end to get additional people into the eligibility column. I genuinely hope that a mechanism can be found to allow those who had loved ones who were admitted due to pregnancy to be included under a future iteration or phase of the redress scheme. I think that the individually assessed redress scheme should cover those pregnant women and girls who were admitted to workhouses. However, as it stands, the scheme would be open to too many applications and it would be extremely difficult to assess. We have heard evidence from departmental officials and PRONI about how difficult it is going to be under the current system to access records in order to assess whether admission took place. What we need to do right now is focus on the adult adoptees and their children who went through the mother-and-baby institutions. In closing, I thank the campaigners who worked with me over the past few weeks to try to change the focus of the Further Consideration Stage.

2,478 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 16:08 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

Disagree with this assessment?

Classifications can be challenged. A person reads every challenge, and any change is recorded publicly above with its reason.

Challenge this classification