Fine Gael has called on the Minister for Education to "revisit" the indemnity deal agreed with religious orders on compensation for those abused in residential institutions.
Party leader Mr Enda Kenny called for Mr Dempsey to go back to the religious congregations and inform them that there was a "moral obligation" to revisit the issue given that the liability was now between the €700 million best estimate of the Department of Education and the Comptroller and Auditor General's €1 billion estimate.
During a day-long debate on the crisis over the Laffoy commission and the indemnity deal, Mr Kenny asked what evidence was available to then minister for education Dr Michael Woods, who negotiated the deal, to indicate the liability should have been capped at €127 million when in 2001 there were indications it would be "grossly in excess of this".
If Dr Woods did not reply for 10 weeks to queries from then attorney general Mr Michael McDowell, it was either "gross incompetence or in keeping with the pattern of obstruction by the Department in supplying infor-mation". Mr Kenny excoriated the Government for its handling of the issue and said the crisis had become "another crude example of a government inspired not by any higher calling but by rank expediency".
In light of the Laffoy commission crisis, this "shameless, leaderless, directionless" Government was now "quite soulless". The Mayo TD said the crisis was "absolutely not" about cost.
He acknowledged that the Taoiseach had made a "proper apology" to victims of institutional abuse, but in handling this latest crisis he had proved to be "a weak chairman and not a chief. He and his ministers have failed spectacularly to rise to what is a matter of national honour and deep psychological import.
"If the country can afford the Flood, Mahon and Moriarty tribunals it can surely find a way to give those broken by the State the voice we took from them, the hearing we denied them and the comfort and compassion we refused them."
However, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, insisted that he had no apology to make to "those members of the Rainbow Coalition who abdicated their responsibility towards victims. They chose to ignore their pleas and now seek to assume the role of champions of these victims. It is nothing more than rank hypocrisy."
Mr Ahern said the average amount of the awards for compensation was "substantially less than we had budgeted for".
The average payment in the 160 cases dealt with by the Institutional Redress Board was €80,000. "It is reasonable to assume that the majority of applications in the most serious cases will be made early on", as was the situation in the army deafness cases, he said.
"Thus the average awards will probably fall over the next number of years."
If cases were left to the courts religious orders would have been entitled to rely upon the statute of limitations, and there was significant doubt over the responsibility of the current membership of religious orders for the wrongful actions of others many decades previously. There was also a problem over whether a member of a religious order was an employee.
