Alternative Executive Summary: Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report:

The Alternative Executive Summary: Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Report, now published, open access with Feminists@Law, builds on the methodology developed by feminist judgments projects to rewrite the Executive Summary to the Final Report of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, published in January 2021.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation was established in February 2015 to investigate experiences in certain of Ireland’s residential institutions for single mothers and their young children between 1922 and 1998. In the rewritten Executive summary, twenty-five academics examined the evidence in the Commission’s original report, and offered a feminist, human rights-based analysis of the evidence presented there.

The document was first published while it was still in draft and launched at an online event on July 14, 2021. The intention in doing this was to allow space and time for requests for amendments and additions. Following publication of the draft, several individuals, including survivors and affected people of relevant abuses, activist groups, historians and other academics offered feedback on the text. Some wrote to us directly. Others completed an online survey which we had made publicly available for this purpose. Their responses were collated revisions made, and the revised text reflects their feedback.

Although requested amendments were made, the text remains largely as published in draft in July 2021. It is not updated to include new factual information that has entered the public domain since the draft was published because the rewritten Executive Summary is based on the information and evidence that was published by the original Commission of Investigation.

The Alternative Summary does not make new findings of fact or depart from the law in force in the relevant time periods. However, it comes to very different general conclusions about the nature, extent and gravity of human rights abuses in these institutions. By contrast with the original report, it finds evidence of harms including forced labour, inhuman and degrading treatment, involuntary detention, non-consensual medical treatment, forced family separation and discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, class and disability. It also finds that the original report underplayed State responsibility for most abuses, even though the state funded and regulated the institutions and tolerated widely-known risks to women and children.

The editors and authors do not intend to present this document as final or absolute, but rather as a contribution to wider understanding of the ways in which the Irish state seeks to control the public narrative of the harms perpetuated by and in its institutions and associated systems of family separation and social control. We recognise that this document is not a substitute for meaningful state action.

Editors

Prof Máiréad Enright, Loughborough University @maireadenright.bsky.social

Prof Aoife O’Donoghue, Queen’s University Belfast ‪@aoifemod.bsky.social