Seanad Éireann - Volume 162 - 27 January, 2000 - Statute of Limitations (Amendment) Bill, 1998: Second Stage.

Seanad Éireann - Volume 162 - 27 January, 2000 - Statute of Limitations (Amendment) Bill, 1998: Second Stage.: "Over the past years our society has finally begun to lift the veil of silence which kept the [97] whole issue of the physical and sexual abuse of children hidden and secret. The horrendous stories of abuse in the past decades and in more recent years have shocked us to the core as a society and forced us to face up to some harsh realities.
We have begun to learn about where power has resided in Ireland, the nature of power and how it has been exercised. In particular we have learned how power has been abused. We now know the power of the church, the State, and authoritarian parents has been used to physically and sexually abuse children and to allow it to continue and, effectively, to protect those who have been responsible, while victims continued to suffer in silence and were not believed. They simply had nowhere to go.
This Bill seeks to give victims an extension of the right which currently exists to take legal action on the basis that it is not tolerable that people should effectively be debarred once they have reached the age of 21 from taking such legal action. The Bill has its roots in the Sophia McColgan case. This case involves the action taken by Ms McColgan and her siblings against the North-Western Health Board and a general practitioner for their failure to act when evidence of severe abuse of these children over a number of years was presented to them."THE DISCOVERABILITY RULE IN THE LIMITATIONS ACT IN MODERN IRELAND?