Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn has rejected a call by survivors of the Protestant-run Bethany mother and baby home to include them in a State redress scheme.
Survivors of the Rathgar based mother and baby home, which closed in 1972, said Mr Quinn had ignored their arguments.
The home, to which some women were referred by the courts, came to public attention last year when 219 unmarked graves of children born there were discovered in Mount Jerome Cemetery.
Earlier this week, some of those born in the home gave the Government a three-month deadline to include them in the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme before they initiate legal proceedings.
Mr Quinn said today that he had found “no basis” to revisit the decision of the previous government in April of last year not to include the Bethany survivors in the scheme. He noted the media reports of the Bethany Survivors Group’s intention to initiate legal proceedings.
In a statement, the Minister said he had examined the question of including the former Bethany residents in the scheme following a meeting with the survivors’ group and Labour TDs Joe Costello and Dominic Hannigan last month.
This examination had included a review of the research undertaken by the group’s researcher Niall Meehan.
“The redress scheme was introduced as an exceptional matter for people who, as children, suffered abuse in residential institutions for which public bodies had responsibility,” Mr Quinn noted.
He said the Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002 specified named institutions and section 4 of the Act allowed for the inclusion of certain categories of institution in the scheme by ministerial order.
“The Bethany Survivor Group claimed that the exclusion of the Bethany Home from the redress scheme was on religious grounds. However...the religious ethos of an institution was not a criterion for inclusion within the scheme,” Mr Quinn said.
He added that while Catholic religious orders ran the majority of specified institutions, others were either run by organisations having a protestant ethos or run on a non-denominational basis.
“The inclusion of the Bethany Home was considered by the previous Fianna Fáil/Green Government and not included within the redress scheme, on the basis that it did not come within the scope of the scheme as it operated as a mother and baby home.”
Mr Quinn said that following the publication of the Ryan report in May 2009, there were a range of requests for the redress scheme to be extended.
These included requests to raise the age limit defining a child from 18 to 21 years, to include additional institutions and to extend the time limit for receipt of applications. Bethany Home was one of the institutions which requested to be included.
“The previous Government considered these requests and announced its decision not to revise the arrangements in April 2010,” he said, adding that “having taken all the circumstances into account” he found no basis to revisit this decision.
Bethany Survivors Group spokesman Derek Leinster said Mr Quinn had ignored the arguments put to him by survivors and was regurgitating arguments of the last government.
“Ruairi Quinn has refused to address the then State’s decision to regulate the sectarianism of the welfare system, but not the actual welfare of neglected and abandoned children," he said.
Mr Leinster said Mr Quinn had rejected not just Bethany survivors but also his party colleagues Joe Costello and Kathleen Lynch who “have been campaigning for years on this issue”.