Child Abuse in Ireland – the cost of eliciting the truth

NOW that €54 billion of the peoples’ prospective wealth is likely to committed to the National Assets Management Agency there is an intense awareness of about trends in  Government spending.

The matter of child sex abuse in industrial schools in Ireland came to prominence in 1999 and the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, made a public apology on behalf of the State in Dáil Éireann. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was then established.

Its mandate was

• To listen to the victims of childhood abuse who wanted to recount their experiences to a sympathetic forum

• To fully investigate all allegations of abuse made to it, except where the victims did not wish for an investigation

• Publish a report on its findings – now commonly known as The Ryan Report which was issued on 20 May 2009.

The Costs

It was estimated that the Commission would complete its work in two years and that the cost would be between €1.9 million and €2.5 million. It actually took ten years to gouge the truth out of 18 religious congregations and the estimated cost of doing so is between €126 million and €136 million.

Administration is estimated at €30 million; the Commission Legal Team €15.73 million; 3^rd party representation €52 - €62 million; responding to enquiries €8.5 million and other State costs € 2million.  Actual costs to the 31 December 2008 were €59,363,107.

The Commission is expected to complete its work next year.

Factors Impacting Cost Level

• Legal challenges and consequent delays – relating to representation, deadline for evidence extension, compellability of a witness in relation to vaccine testing to attend at public hearing; challenge by the Christian Brothers on fair procedures and disclosure of details by the Confidential Committee

• Reviews of Commission work and additional added functions concerning vaccine trials.

• There was ‘non-effective expenditure’ between November 2001 and September 2005 of €1,153,204 in connection with an extension of the Inquiry into children in institutions’ being subjected to vaccine trials between 1940 and 1987. This aspect of the Inquiry did not proceed.

• The former Chairman of the Commission, Ms Justice Laffoy cited impediments to the work of the Commission for the 3 years prior to 1 September 2003. She stood down at that time and was replaced by Mr Justice Seán Ryan by whose name the Commissions May 2009 Report is known.

• Ryan recommended that the Commission refocus the work of the Investigation Committee on abuse of children. Procedural changes were put in place to streamline efficiency. The obligation to hear each and every allegation was removed and witnesses were called to the extent that the Investigation Committee deemed necessary. Interim reports would be published and a renewed effort was to be made to strengthen trust between all parties.

• Delays in agreeing a scheme of legal expenses. From May 2001 to April 2002, an initial brief fee of €34,918 and €23,279 was payable to senior and junior counsel respectively. A refresher fee of €1,905 and €1,270 per day was agreed for the first 40 days. These were slightly higher than fees for other tribunals. New fees of €2,250 for a senior and €1,500 for a junior counsel were agreed in January 2004.

• Absence of a scheme for the payment of compensation to victims – agreed in principle in October 2000 but not resolved until April 2002 with the enactment of the Residential Institutions Redress Act 2002 and the establishment of the Residential Institutions Redress Board as a separate process.

“Suffering of the abused must not be prolonged”

Fr Sean Healy, the ubiquitous spokesman on justice matters, wrote an opinion article in The Irish Times yesterday, Thursday 28 May. He states that he uses Gospel based principles to validate what he has to say. His stated posture is typically one seeking to alleviate the distress of ‘the vulnerable’, but I think, at this stage, there is nobody more vulnerable than the author. But we also discovered that the organisation he represents, CORI, has no executive function so that begs the question his speaking platform is a mere badge of convenience for him to describe the elusive ‘desirable future’, almost a decade into the future. But who is bothered if in fact he says absolutely nothing?

His response to The Ryan Report is almost like the all-purpose approach that a technician might have towards any technical blip, such as clearing a blocked drain. The prescription, or pathway forward, he tells us is to be based on additional compensation or restitution, adequate apologies, and a period of refection of humiliation and everybody is back in business - ‘two of sand, one of cement’. But will this prescription cure the patient or kill it?

It very noticeable how public sentiment has so briskly outpaced Government opinion with respect to this issue. The dignified radio interviews with many victims were really most compelling. Some succeeded in enjoying stability and security but were unable to fully reveal the circumstances of their background, their shattered lives and that awful sense of shame and guilt by attribution that was inflicted on them by those who maintain that their core principles, as stated by Fr Healy, are based on “justice, human dignity and compassion”.

Money is only an element of the response to this debacle. It is convenient because it is tangible and finite. It is transactional in nature and recordable for posterity. But in this instance, it will never adequately reciprocate the fatal damage done to public trust. No amount of blarney, bluster or acceptability through association with nice ideas and aspirations will turn the clock back to the time that religious congregations were trusted and respected.

This Report only deals with a subset of a much more pervasive crisis on confidence in religious personnel. Child sex abuse has been proven in so many dimensions over the past 25 years, or so. Unfortunately, there are more reports of abuse pending.

It has been interesting from the perspective of due process unfolding to observe the Church reaction to the many crises that have occurred in Ireland and elsewhere. The typically begin with apologies, regrets and sympathy before inertia sets in. The second phase is a closing of ranks and is frequently characterised by differences of opinion among Church leaders. But the wagons circle and the ranks close until the next controversy and the inevitable humiliation that ensues.

I have the impression that society, rather than Church or Government are now in pole position and their patience and tolerance is past breaking point.

The congregations currently cited and others were inaugurated in another era, to meet quite different circumstances. But, like the former manager of the Cork hurling team, they have ‘lost the dressing room’ and many now question whether the humility that Fr Healy refers to is actually their disbandment.

Child Abuse Report, a chilling profile of violated trust

Almost every metropolitan newspaper across the world published a story on Thursday, May 21^st about the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in Ireland.

The Commission was established on 23 May 2000 and heard evidence of childhood abuse from attendees of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages, and a hospital or in a child’s own home since 1940. Industrial schools were established under law in 1868 Ireland to cater for neglected, orphaned or abandoned children.

Public awareness of extensive childhood abuse in these schools was heightened by a television documentary, States of Fear in 1999 that lead to a public apology in the Dáil (Parliament) by the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern TD. This coincided with the exposure of widespread clerical child sex abuse in Ireland, United States and elsewhere.

The types of abuse investigated included:

• Physical abuse - infliction of injury or failure to prevent injury
  
• Sexual abuse – use of a child for sexual gratification or arousal
  
• Neglect – failure to care properly
  
• Emotional abuse

Examples of abuse included, for example, being caned on bare buttocks, being invited to ‘search’ for a coin in the pant pocket of a cleric, being obliged to spend overnight in the open air, often during inclement weather, sharing a bed with an alcoholic nun, being stripped and beaten in front of other people and inflicting bruising and black eyes.

Approximately 170,000 children attended these institutions between 1936 and 1970. The issue of compensation was determined by a Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB) and a total of 14,584 applications were received by 15 December 2005.

The position in May 2009 is that RIRB has completed 13,190 cases and has made awards totalling €787.45 million and the average value of the 12,436 awards made to date has been €63,320. A total of 1,892 awards were for sums in excess of €100,000 and 27 were in the €200,000 - €300,000 range.

A total of €138.5 million was paid in legal costs to 817 firms of solicitors.

The Irish Government entered into a contractually binding agreement in 2002 with the 18 religious congregations implicated in the Report which capped their liability at €127 million. It was anticipated that this would represent a 50-50 burden share between the State and the religious congregations. But this has not been the case in practice and the religious congregations will not increase their contribution.

The publication of the Report was spurred debate and discussion about:

• The issue of compensation and burden sharing with many advocating a greater contribution by the religious congregations in the light of the evidence contained in the Report
  
• The violation of public trust and the future relationship of citizens with the religious congregations and their representative organization the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI)
  
• The appropriateness of a memorial to commemorate victims.

Response of Religious Congregations

There are 80 active religious congregations in Ireland and of these 18 are cited in the Child Abuse Report.
When this report was published last week it would have been interesting to discover the response of their representation, the Congregation of Religious of Ireland (CORI), especially from a justice perspective. But there has been no comment whatsoever.

The nation has, however, heard CORI, at its most passive, “is not aware of any plans to revisit the terms of the compensation deal concluded in 2002” . This has been reconfirmed on Monday, May 25th. The counterparty to this agreement, the Irish Government, advise that it is inviolable from a legal perspective, while other politicians seem content to exploit the revulsion of the electorate for the purpose of aggrandizing, grand-standing and posturing within days of a set of elections.

Three compelling issues arise as a consequence of this Report and the forensic detail contained therein:

1. The first and most obvious relates to the compensation of victims and on whom the burden for this falls. The timing of the compensation agreement reached 7 years ago was two years after the Commission was established on 23 May 2000 and 17 months before the resignation of Ms Justice Laffoy as Chairman of the Commissioners on 12 December 2003 on grounds of dissatisfaction with the level of government cooperation being given the Commission at that time.
   The evidence that is now in the public domain combined, with the very large number of victims whose claims has been accepted, put the matter of compensation and burden-sharing into a completely different context than that which prevailed in the summer of 2002 and this perspective was supported by Most Rev Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin.
   
   This agreement maybe watertight and it may define the finite element of burden-sharing from a legal perspective. But it is not an agreement on faith, hope, charity or justice. It is an agreement that is essentially based on low peasant-cunning.
   
   The diminishing cohort of Irish taxpayers, at a time of chronic economic recession and whose own livelihoods are under constant threat, are to bear a burden for the criminality of your members’ which will absorb all of the customs, all of the capital gains tax and all of the capital acquisition tax revenue that that State will receive in 2009.
   
2. The second issue concerns the violation of public trust. Public trust is not something that is created from money, or by a photo-opportunity on the plinth of Leinster House with an ageing government minister and a soon to retire secretary-general of the Department of Education & Science, or over a glass of port, or cup of coffee in Buswells Hotel. It is certainly not a commodity that is a function of the amount paid in respect of victim compensation, however adequate or inadequate, the burden-sharing of that might be.
   
   Trust is precious. It is hard-earned but the pantheons’ of upon which it exists collapse to powder and rubble when the basis for it has been fatally undermined. The18 religious congregations concerned with these episodes of grotesque abuse have lost public confidence and respect. The genesis of the social and justice objectives that CORI seek to alleviate – homelessness, binge drinking, social isolation, destitution of body and spirit, can be attributed directly to the abuse cited in the Report which covers 170,000 poor, wretched, vulnerable minors, many of whom now have issue and lineage.
   
   This rupture of public trust means that the heirs, successors and lineal descendants of those who demanded that a child lick faeces off the boot, or was regularly raped and sodomised by a members’ of up to 18 religious congregations’ now have as much authenticity in the forum of public esteem as those of a ventriloquist representing the interests in Ireland, of the successors, issue and lineal descendants of Oliver Cromwell, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler.
   
3. The third issue concerns whether a memorial of some sort is appropriate to commemorate the legacy of what has been revealed in the Report. I can think of no more appropriate memorial than the immediate disbandment of each of those congregations’ cited in the Report.
   
   If it can be successfully demonstrated that this would ignore the contribution of many fine contemporary individual members of a congregation, then perhaps alternative proposals might be put forward to capture whatever energy and remnants of integrity are worthy of perpetual continuity. But one thing is abundantly clear – the high minded ideals and mission of their founders’ have been diverted and embedded in the genitals and rectums of too many children for them to continue as the paragons of virtue which they deem themselves to be.

List of Cited Congregations

1. The Rosminian Institute of Charity
2. The Dominican Order
3. The Sisters of Mercy
4. Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd
5. The Presentation Brothers
6. The Religious Sisters of Charity
7. The Christian Brothers
8. The Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul
9. The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge
10. The Brothers of Charity
11. The Daughters of the Heart of Mary
12. The De La Salle Brothers
13. The Sisters of St Clare
14. The Presentation Sisters
15. The Sisters of St Louis
16. The Hospitaller Order of St John of God
17. The Sisters of Nazareth
18. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate