The Minister for Education and Science, Mr Dempsey, has rejected as "a myth" claims that religious congregations will be able to renege on a commitment to pay €128 million to a compensation fund for victims of abuse.
"Every red cent of that will be got in either property or cash. If we can not get it in property we will get it in cash," Mr Dempsey told the Joint Committee on Education and Science yesterday.
Speaking ahead of the publication today of a Comptroller and Auditor General report into the indemnity deal, he said "one way or the other" compensation would have to have been paid by the taxpayer.
By setting up a non-adversarial redress scheme part-funded by the congregations, in return for which they were indemnified from future legal actions by abuse victims, "very few" such people were likely to go to the courts, thereby saving the State money in costs.
Mr Dempsey was responding to criticism of the deal from committee members, including Mr Paul Gogarty TD (Greens) who said the 18 religious congregations involved seemed "to have got away with blue murder".
Referring to reports that the comptroller would put the overall cost to the State of compensating victims near €1 billion, Ms Joan Burton TD (Labour) asked why the deal had not been conditional on the congregations' co-operation with the commission of inquiry into abuse.
In a separate development, Mr Dempsey yesterday confirmed he was considering convening a round-table meeting between the religious congregations and victim support groups to try to speed up the work of the commission.
Mr Dempsey said he had not previously sought to speak to bodies representing religious orders, such as CORI, about streamlining the inquiry as it might have exposed them to the allegation of doing "secret deals".
However, since Ms Justice Laffoy's resignation as head of the commission, victim support groups had asked him to speak to the congregations to see if they would be willing to meet. Mr Dempsey said they further requested that he might chair the meeting and "I would have no difficulty in doing that".
Mr Dempsey also confirmed that his Department would ask the commission to contact each of the approximately 1,700 people concerned to see if they continued to wish to go before the investigation committee. He said there would be "no attempt" to influence people to go before the less-time-consuming confidential committee instead.
However, he said, there was a view that quite a number of people had opted for the investigative committee because they believed they could not go to the redress board otherwise.
He added the Department had "parked" the question of whether the commission should investigate just a sample of cases, rather than all of them, until it saw the outcome of the consultation.
Yesterday's meeting was temporarily adjourned when a survivor of abuse in the public gallery, Mr Gerry Kelly, interrupted Mr Michael Mulcahy TD (FF) when the deputy tried to defend the Government's stance on the inquiry.
Mr Kelly was removed from the committee.
