The Department of Education has estimated that the final bill for compensation to victims of abuse in orphanages and industrial schools could be €1.2 billion.
The secretary general of the Department of Education, Brigid McManus, told the Dáil Public Accounts Committee yesterday that the average cost of awards made by the Residential Institutions Redress Board was now running at around €63,000.
She said the Department of Education had this year set out a contingency figure of €1.3 billion for the cost of the compensation scheme. However, the average cost of awards had reduced in recent months, and the department now estimated that the final bill would be around €1.2 billion.
The Comptroller and Auditor General, John Purcell, said he believed the compensation scheme would ultimately cost between €1 billion and €1.1 billion. He said so far over 6,500 claims had been dealt with by the redress board, and €565 million had been paid out. Legal and administrative costs were running at about 20 per cent of the cost of awards.
He said 14,541 applications for compensation had been received. In 151 cases the application had either been withdrawn, refused or a nil award made. There was one suspected case of fraud.
The Department of Education originally estimated that the compensation scheme would cost around €250 million.
As part of a deal reached in 2002 with the State, 18 religious congregations which managed the orphanages and industrial schools paid over €128 million in cash and property in return for an indemnity against future legal actions by former residents.
Ms McManus also told the committee there were now an estimated 32,000 children from abroad in the Irish education system. Some 20,000 newcomer children were in primary schools and 12,000 at second level.
She said the Central Statistics Office had estimated that 8,000 newcomer children would enter the first and second-level education system in the next 10 years. It was forecast that 60 per cent of these children would need language support.
Ms McManus said the Department of Education was in the process of removing the controversial cap of two language-support teachers allowed to schools with large numbers of students from overseas.
She said it was estimated that between 27 and 30 per cent of children in schools in disadvantaged areas experienced some difficulties with literacy and numeracy.
It was "disappointing" that reading standards in designated disadvantaged schools had not improved, and that the same lack of improvement in numeracy was evident in a recent report of a national survey of achievements in mathematics.
Meanwhile the Department of Finance told the committee that it has uncovered nearly 20 instances where Government bodies paid staff on retirement for leave which had been built up in breach of official policy.
The comptroller recently reported that a senior official at the department received an overpayment of nearly €54,000 arising from untaken leave which had accumulated since 1994. This money was repaid.
Ms McManus said the department had allowed staff to carry over leave. "There were considerable work pressures in the department over the period resulting in staff not taking their full holidays and carrying forward untaken leave, thereby allowing some of these pressures to be addressed."
