The Mother-and-Baby Institutions Payment Scheme opens for applications today.
It will provide financial payments and health supports to those who are eligible.
The redress scheme aims to acknowledge the circumstances experienced in Mother-and-Baby or County Home Institutions in Ireland.
However, it is estimated that 24,000 survivors have been excluded from redress.
Parts of the scheme have been criticised including the six-month stay requirement to ensure that all eligible children, including children who were adopted, boarded out and fostered, were resident in a relevant institution.
The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and others have said the 180-day period is not an indicator of whether a child suffered harm, such as from the forced separation of mother and child.
Similarly, a person must have been resident for 180 days to be entitled to a health support payment or eligible for the provision of health services without charge.
However, many believe those who were resident in an institution for any length of time should be eligible for those supports.
There has also been a call for the removal of the rule excluding mothers accessing the enhanced medical card if they were resident for less than six months.
Questions have also been posed about the number of people that have died since the act was signed into law last year and its enactment.
Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Roderic O’Gorman has pointed out that under the act, the personal representative of a deceased relevant person, who died on or after 13 January 2021, can apply to the scheme which was the date of the then Taoiseach’s apology to survivors of these institutions on behalf of the State.
The apology followed the leaking of the Commission of Investigation’s final report into the Mother-and-Baby Institutions to the print media.
It caused considerable distress among the survivors and an investigation was conducted into the Taoiseach’s office to establish how it occurred.
In response to a parliamentary question submitted by Aontú, the Taoiseach said the internal investigation into the leak of the report was completed in December 2022.
In a statement, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín described the timeline as “very interesting”, given that he “asked the then Taoiseach Micheál Martin on 13 December 2022, on the floor of the Dáil, whether it was he who leaked the report on the mother and baby homes to the media”.
Deputy Tóibín said he was told that there was no update on the report at the time.
“The current Taoiseach is saying the former Taoiseach received the report three days after that Dáil exchange, and one day before Micheál Martin resigned as Taoiseach,” he said.
He added: “The fact that the report was leaked, and the findings of the investigation into the leak were then concealed for fourteen months represents a kick in the teeth for survivors”.
