The excavation of the darker sides of Irish life in past decades continued this week with the publication of the report by senior counsel Mary O’Toole into sexual abuse at boarding and day schools.
In the week when Prof Diarmaid Ferriter launched his latest history, the Revelation of Ireland, 1995-2020, it seems that the grim revelations about parts of our history will continue. This is unlikely to be the last of them.
This week’s report was prompted by the stories of abuse told by former students of Blackrock College in Dublin, perhaps the country’s most famous and celebrated school. Back in the 1990s, when the gruesome revelations of widespread physical and sexual abuse in industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories first emerged, many observers reflected that this is what the State and the Church had done to the poorest, most unfortunate, most wretched of our children. It would never happen to the children of the wealthy, the best connected, the expensively educated, they insisted.
Well, now we know the truth: the abusers harboured by the orders – and in some cases protected and facilitated by them – were equal opportunities predators. Wealth and class and privilege were no defence: you just had to be unlucky.
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So a very obvious corollary: the abuse of children on a comparable scale is likely to have taken place in other schools as well, not covered by the O’Toole report. If so, the numbers are going to be a lot bigger than the 2,400 allegations reported this week.
That will have to be kept in mind as complex and morally difficult decisions now present themselves to the Government – or rather, to the next government, as one of the present lot told me during the week. It will have to decide the scope of the Commission of Investigation that is now to be set up, and also the nature and size of the redress scheme. (It should be noted that some of the orders have been engaging with survivors, hearing their stories and – in some cases – paying them compensation.)
The general expectation in Government had been that a redress scheme would have to wait until the conclusion of the inquiry. This week has seen that assumption dissolve.
Simon Harris, his political antennae twitching furiously even over in Kyiv, picked this up. He told reporters covering his trip to the Ukrainian capital on Wednesday that redress could not be “parked” until after a full statutory inquiry was completed. Resolving the question of how offering redress to victims of abuse could not wait until the end of the coming Commission of Investigation process, he said. “People can’t wait five, six, seven years, longer.”
This caused a minor flap back in Dublin (one of a number this week, I gather), but Harris is right. The redress scheme will have to run at the same time as the investigation.
This realisation has prompted a wave of concern about the costs, attested to by several people at the higher reaches of Government with whom I spoke this week. None of these people dispute at all the need for a redress scheme. But they are concerned about its extent, and about who foots the bill. One ventured that it could cost €5 billion.
For context, and by reference to the controversy du jour, that would buy you about 15,000 Dáil bike shelters. So the Government must go into this with its eyes open.
There are a few very clear lessons from the past: the inquiry will go on for longer than planned; the bill for redress will be a lot larger than expected; it will be very hard to get money out of the religious orders. For illustration, consider the redress scheme for victims of abuse in industrial schools, set up in 2002. After Bertie Ahern made his State apology in 1999, the Government began negotiations with the orders over who would pay for compensation for the victims of abuse in the institutions run by the orders but to which the State had sent children.
The total bill (remember that the orders were the ones with the records) was expected to be about €250 million. So the State agreed with the orders (in controversial and unusual circumstances that need not detain us here) that each would pay about €125 million – but, crucially, the orders’ contribution was capped. In other words, if the bill turned out to be bigger, the State would be on the hook for it. Amazingly (or maybe not amazingly at all) that is exactly what happened. In fact, the total bill was a billion euro higher than originally estimated. (Actually, some of us had been warning about this for years beforehand; and remember that a billion euro was a lot of money back in the day.)
Following an outcry when the inquiry report was published, the orders said they would pay another €350 million. But just €120 million has been paid. In other words, of the €1.25 billion, the orders have paid about €250 million. You’ve paid the rest. You’ve also paid €200 million in legal costs, which saw some solicitors’ firms net massive fees – including six which were paid more than €10 million each.
I attended one of the schools named this week and had a wonderful experience; clearly not everyone did. Now I have more questions than answers. Do we really need a massive inquiry running for years on every instance of abuse in any school? Or would a limited sampling process not be better? Who gets redress? Everyone who makes an allegation? How can the religious orders be compelled to make a meaningful contribution? Can we minimise the involvement of lawyers? What services should be sacrificed to pay for all this? And can we finally – finally – learn some lessons from the past?
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