The Department of Education and Science should not lose responsibility for controlling the State's dealings with the investigation into child abuse at religious-run institutions, the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, has insisted.
In her final report as chairwoman of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Miss Justice Mary Laffoy complained sharply about the level of co-operation offered by the Department since the commission's creation.
Strongly defending the Department's performance yesterday, the Minister said Education and Science had already presented more than 500,000 documents to the inquiry.
"It has become a little bit of a mantra to take it out of the Department of Education and Science and put it into the Department of the Taoiseach, or wherever else.
"The Department of Education and Science is the sponsoring Department for this particular piece of legislation. It is normal procedure that the Department directly responsible is the one that acts of behalf of the Government," he told RTÉ's This Week.
"The Department of Education and Science does not act on its own. It is subject to the will of the Government, it is subject to the decisions of the Government.
"Suppose we decide that we are going to put this into another Department? Then the new Department is going to have to build up the expertise," he declared.
However, Fine Gael TD Ms Olwyn Enright said the Minister's remarks showed that he was "clearly in denial" over the criticisms levelled by Miss Justice Laffoy in her final report.
"The Minister seems incapable of accepting that he has political responsibility for the effective operation and resourcing of a tribunal of inquiry under his ambit," said Fine Gael's education spokeswoman.
The Minister's complaints about the difficulties faced by the Department of Education and Science in meeting the inquiry's demands were not good enough, she said.
"If you were a private citizen it would not be good enough to say that you did not have enough resources. You would have to find out what the tribunal told you to find out," she said.
"He constantly speaks in a detached manner about the costs associated with the inquiry and the manpower needed to facilitate timely responses to the inquiry's requests. The Minister may claim that he has not actively blocked the work of the commission but it is his job to make sure that it works effectively and addresses the needs and concerns of those victims," she said.
In her report, Miss Justice Laffoy had complained strongly about the Department's failure to respond adequately in cases where its role in inspecting institutions was under the spotlight.
In his This Week interview, Mr Dempsey said Miss Justice Laffoy had acknowledged "throughout the report the difficulties that faced the Department".
"We were all on a learning curve. We did not know the resources that would be needed. The commission itself acknowledged the amount of work that had to be done," he said.
He said he would not accept that the judge "didn't get the co-operation, or that we hampered it. I appreciate that there were difficulties. The difficulties were caused, as Judge \ Ryan subsequently pointed out, by the ambition in the Act itself," he said.
"Everything did not stop within the Department. We had thousands of special-needs cases that had to be looked after, the ongoing running of the education system. We were not given extra resources, or extra personnel by Government to do this," he added.
Meanwhile, Ms Jan O'Sullivan TD (Labour) said the Minister had responded "feebly" to "unprecedented criticism".
