Meeting of the Parliament 12 June 2025
Presiding Officer,
“Trust is sacred. Our trust was broken as little girls—and now, trust in the system that’s supposed to help us and do right by us has been shattered.”
Those are the words of the Fornethy survivors. Some of those brave women are with us in the public gallery today. Hundreds more have shared their story.
For those who are unfamiliar with that story, those women, along with thousands of others, were sent to Fornethy as vulnerable wee girls between the 1960s and early 1990s. Fornethy was a sprawling 16th-century mansion in the Angus countryside, secluded and surrounded by woodland. It was one of the small number of schools run by Glasgow Corporation, later Strathclyde Regional Council, under its scheme of residential education for disadvantaged children.
Most of those girls stayed for four to eight weeks, sometimes more than once. Some were as young as five years old. They were sent away to somewhere new and exciting—a place to rest and recuperate. One survivor said:
“I remember getting on a bus with a suitcase. I was going on holiday for the first time. I recall the door opening and seeing a huge staircase. I was so happy and excited”.
However, that excitement quickly turned to fear. Rather than rest and recuperation, many of those wee girls were subjected to appalling abuse. My constituent, Marion Reid from Carluke is one of those women. She said:
“I travelled in a black cab to Fornethy from Riddrie, where I lived at the time. I was taken in through the big arch door, and as soon as that door closed, my nightmare began—six weeks of hell I’ve carried with me all of my life.”
Those wee girls’ hell was concealed, covered up and kept from parents. The children were made to write “nice” letters home, copied word for word from a blackboard. One survivor said:
“On leaving that dark place, my older sister was asked to tell my mum what a good girl I’d been. My five-year-old mind could only feel horror that this was how good girls were treated”.
I have listened to these testimonies. Some shared stories that they have never shared with their own families. Today, I wanted to bring those stories to Parliament to give a voice to those brave women, but I recognise that we must respect the on-going criminal and civil proceedings. My focus today will therefore be on the failures of Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Government to show that same respect to those women.
They have been campaigning for five and a half years against those failures, and they are still waiting for a full and meaningful apology. They are still waiting even for a meeting with Glasgow City Council. They are still waiting for access to the redress scheme. They are still waiting for answers about why the abuse at Fornethy went unchecked for so many years.