THE Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Family will seek the sections of the Madonna House report withheld by the Government yesterday.
Mr Alan Shatter, the member of the committee who managed to circumvent the Government's original ban on publishing the Kelly Fitzgerald report, signalled that such a course of action may be undertaken last night.
The seemingly new Government practice of censoring controversial sections of sensitive reports was criticised by Opposition parties yesterday.
However, senior Government sources confirmed that in the case of the Madonna House, Kelly Fitzgerald and Mountjoy Prison reports, Ministers were acting on the advice of the Attorney General, Mr Dermot Gleeson.
Three general principles underlay the new practice, according to informed sources: there might be potential criminal proceedings which the State did not want to prejudice; there might be defamation of people who had not had a chance to reply to allegations, and general statements about groups of people could libel individuals as well; finally, there was the question of victims' rights. People who suffered sexual or other abuse might not want that information to be made public.
The well placed sources explained that the State did not control the authorship of these reports, but it was responsible for their publication and carried legal liability for their contents.
Asked if the apparent change in attitude governing the publication of controversial reports related to a new practice by this Attorney General or the contents of the reports in question, the sources said it was coincidental that there were two reports of this nature in recent times. "In some eases, reports were not published at all before. We are trying to be open by putting as much as possible on the public record".
They never had child abuse eases of this nature before, Government sources added. They had come to a head under this Government.
The Madonna House and Kelly Fitzgerald reports were written, in the first instance, for other authorities. They might not have been for general circulation at all the sources stated.
For legal reasons, the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, and his Minister of State, Mr Austin Currie, decided not to publish the Kelly Fitzgerald report. They agreed, instead, to make the report available to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Family. The chairman of the committee, Mr Paul McGrath, suggested that members should meet in private to consider it.
This strategy was circumvented, however, when Mr Shatter successfully moved that the committee should adopt the Western Health Board's report as its own preliminary report. It was laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas and members were invited to make submissions on it to help the committee in its deliberations.
The Kelly Fitzgerald report through this mechanism, was covered by Dail privilege. Its contents were immune from litigation. A similar course of action may be considered for the two chapters of the Madonna House report withheld from publication yesterday.
The Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, said yesterday that there was a section of the annual report of the Visiting Committee of
Mountjoy Prison which was causing legal concern. "I am obliged by law not to libel anyone", she added.
She was looking at the possibility of publishing the report without the section which was being examined by the Attorney General's Office.
