Alicia Kearns
Main Page: Alicia Kearns (Conservative - Rutland and Stamford)Department Debates - View all Alicia Kearns's debates with the Cabinet Office
(4 weeks, 2 days ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for her work on the APPG and for her campaigning, and acknowledge what she has done. As for the number, 185,000 is a shocking figure, but I worry that it may be higher than that. I worry that there are cases that we still do not know about—those where the records are not available and where, as I say, some people feel that they still cannot talk. That rapid access to therapeutic support is hugely important and she is right to highlight it.
Alicia Kearns (Rutland and Stamford) (Con)
To all the mothers and your stolen children who have wrongly carried grief and shame for so long, you were denied the love that you deserved and tortured by a state—and the silence only revictimized you. We are sorry. It is shameful that Barnardo’s and the Salvation Army have yet to apologise and face up to the role that they played in this. My father was haunted by the way in which Barnardo’s played a role and he would tell me of his horror, which he carried for life, of seeing the laundries as he walked around the streets of Dublin.
In addition to those who were cruelly and forcibly adopted, hundreds of babies died—frankly, they were killed—as their mothers were tortured, and they were buried in unmarked graves. Will the Prime Minister, as he continues with his important work on this, put in place an effort to find those graves and to force the opening up of those records so that the mothers who were denied a lifetime of memories with their children can at least now bury them and have time at those graves with them?
The Prime Minister
I can give that undertaking, and I thank the hon. Member for raising that important aspect. With each question, with each issue, we can begin to understand the very many ways in which the injustice—across a number of different fields and a number of different strands—played its part. For those who lost their babies altogether, that work on graves and on records is really important.