We need to know we can trust our Taoiseach

FOUR brave survivors of the truly shocking abuse that occurred in the many infamous industrial and reformatory schools all over Ireland, including here in Kerry, ended their 51-day hunger strike outside Dáil Éireann last November after doing a deal with the Taoiseach Micheál Martin for vital, State-provided medical services.

At least that’s what they thought they had done.

But now they are being forced to resume their campaign with another protest outside the Dáil on September 22, insisting that Taoiseach Martin has welched on their agreement. They accuse our head of Government of simply breaking his word.

How pathetic is that?

Tralee woman Miriam Moriarty Owens was one of those hunger-strikers from last year, and like the others she took the Taoiseach’s word as his bond. She was convinced that, finally, the State would give them all necessary health services.

But two weeks ago, Ms Moriarty Owens told this newspaper how numerous fellow survivors have not even been made aware of their new entitlements and medical care was being denied them as the Government hadn’t even bothered to inform doctors and pharmacists of the agreement reached.

The whole thing is utterly disgusting. Survivors of these cruel and inhuman institutions have suffered enough all their lives as a direct consequence of what they went through in those horrible places.

And now, all these years later, the deal they believed they reached with the Taoiseach has now been broken.

Ms Moriarty Owens, who was just a tiny little baby girl when she was kept at Nazareth House in Tralee, says the breaking of the deal has caused shock, hurt and outrage amongst survivors.

She told Kerry’s Eye of speaking to an 84-year-old survivor who was on the brink of giving up entirely. She said the woman told her quietly that she wanted to end her life.

Isn’t that just heartbreaking – and for what reason?

Taoiseach Micheál Martin is not the kind of man you’d expect to renege on a deal with Ms Moriarty Owens and her survivor colleagues. He would not want such a charge staining his otherwise creditable political reputation.

Therefore, he needs to fix this – NOW, straight away and without any delay whatsoever.

In the first 70 years after independence, Ireland was a cold house for, in particular, mothers who failed to comply with strict, doctrinaire Catholic moral principles which majored in everything that was directly in opposition to the original teachings of Christianity.

The Nazarene certainly wouldn’t have countenanced what went on in his name in Nazareth House in Tralee or any of the other gulags around the country that were supposed to operate along Christian tenets.

The core tenet of love was in short supply in such dreadful places.

What happened to these women and children can never be undone. It will never be put right.

But the State has a bounden responsibility to do everything within its power to mitigate the consequences on survivors of such awfulness.

That’s why the deal done with Ms Moriarty Owens and her colleagues last November should be honoured.

We need to know that our Taoiseach is a man of his word.