Regina Ceoli hostel not part of redress scheme

Marie Therese O'Loughlin is seeking the addition of the Regina Ceoli mother-and-baby unit to the institutions being considered by Residential Institutions Redress Board, so she can get redress for the injuries she received there in 1952.

Under the Residential Institutions Redress Act 2002, institutions that were not originally on the 2002 list can be added by ministerial order if they comply with Section 4 of the act, which states: "The minister may by order provide for the insertion in the schedule of any industrial school, reformatory school, orphanage, children's home... in which children were placed and resident in respect of which a public body has a regulatory or inspection function."

In the original list, contained in the act itself, there were 128 institutions. Since then Mary Hanafin, Minister for Education and Science, has added some 16 institutions by ministerial order. In November 2004 she signed an order for 13 institutions to be added. In July 2005, three more institutions were added. The Department of Education and Science says that "the Regina Ceoli facility was essentially a hostel and as such it does not come within the terms of section 4, therefore it is not open to the Minister to place it on the schedule." According to Mary Hanafin, the Department of Health and Children does not have any records to suggest that any public body inspected or regulated the facility; therefore it cannot be added to the list. When the Morning Star hostel was set up in 1927, the State provided the buildings. Three years later they opened the women's hostel, but it soon became a mother-and-baby unit. According to Father Eamonn McCarthy, who now works in the Morning Star men's hostel, the two were always inspected by the State. "As far as I know it was inspected, it was irresponsible if they didn't". He recalls that in 1963 the State was threatening to close it down, so he assumes it must have been under some kind of State inspection process. Nowadays the State pays for the electricity and inspects it regularly. Village asked the Department of Health and Children when they began inspecting the mother and baby unit. They didn't respond.

Joe Costello says that any "feeder institutions" to State-owned institutiions should be added to the list.

Olwyn Enright, the Fine Gael spokesperson on Education and Science, has raised the matter with the Minister on several occasions. "Technically under the act the institution doesn't apply, but surely the State had a duty to that 18 month-old-child, are we going to leave her out there until she is seriously ill?" On 15 December the three-year deadline for those seeking compensation under the act is up. But the Minister can extend the time for the board to consider additional cases.

Emma Browne