Compensation for mother and baby home victims and survivors ‘should be £20,000’

The compensation for victims and survivors of mother and baby homes should be doubled to £20,000, a Stormont committee has heard.

Phoenix Law solicitor Claire McKeegan warned MLAs scrutinising a draft Bill that a “derisory” sum risks inflicting further harm on the victims and survivors.

She was speaking at the Executive Office Committee at Stormont which is scrutinising the Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) and Redress Scheme Bill.

More than 14,000 women and girls are thought to have passed through institutions which were run by the Catholic Church, religious orders, some Protestant denominations as well as the state.

Many were found to have been mistreated, held against their will and forced to give up their children for adoption.

The Inquiry (Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries and Workhouses) and Redress Scheme Bill was introduced at the Assembly earlier this year.

The Bill is to establish a statutory public inquiry and a statutory redress scheme, with a payment of £10,000 to be made to eligible claimants, and a £2,000 payment to eligible family members on behalf of a loved one who has died since September 29 2011.

The committee heard from legal professionals on Wednesday, with calls to increase the payment to £20,000 and extend the timescale for those who qualify to 1922.

Ms McKeegan said it is an issue that touches one in five families across Northern Ireland.

“Sadly many of our clients have died waiting for justice, survivors must be given access to records at long last, this has been denied to them for decades,” she told MLAs.

She raised the current time limits in the Bill as an issue, saying that the date for posthumous claims should not be cut off in 2011.

“Those who died before then are cut out… this issue has caused a huge amount of hurt across the survivor groups, they are united on that, it is interpreted by them as cruel, arbitrary and cost-cutting, and it will be subject to legal challenge… If that could be resolved now it would avoid further cost and further delay of the inquiry and redress,” she told MLAs.

“Compensation is also an issue that has been raised by all the survivors in their consultation responses. Fifty-four per cent of those who responded to the public consultation disagreed with the £10,000 standardised payment. This has been lifted from the Historical Institutional Abuse payment scheme, and is long out of date.

“Those recommendations were made in 2017, and the sum when looking at harm done must recognise that these are women who were abused, had their children taken away and a minor assault claim would attract a much higher level of damage.

“Our clients have said at least £20,000… when you look at not only being incarcerated in an institution where all your rights have been eroded, you’ve been verbally and physically assaulted, and then suffered the further indignity of having your child removed from you.

“Redress is supposed to be something which acknowledges wrong and assists the affected person to move on with their life, and if it becomes derisory in any way that just adds to the harm.”

Ms McKeegan also urged that victims and survivors are given core participant status in the inquiry to allow them to “fully prepare and participate in this daunting legal process”.

“It will be very distressing and retraumatising for them to come forward and share their experiences and to allow society to learn from what they endured,” she said.

Gary Duffy from KRW Law, who also represents victims, survivors and their families, pressed for extending the timescale of those who qualify back to 1922 in terms of recognition.

“The number may be tiny but for the people who could avail of it, it seems manifestly unfair to say they have been arbitrarily cut off even though what happened to your mother, for example, would have attracted compensation if she was still alive,” he said.