The compensation deal with the church was agreed on the last administration's final day. Did some ministers take their eye off the ball, asks Mark Hennessy, Political Reporter
Five years ago, it was regularly and confidently predicted that compensation claims for hearing loss by current and former members of the Defence Forces would cost €2 billion and break the Exchequer.
The outcome has been a little more prosaic. So far, the Department of Defence has paid out €260 million, and it will probably have to come up with a further €90 million to bring the affair to an end.
The example is, perhaps, worth remembering the next time one hears that the Residential Institutions Redress Board will pay out billions to former inmates of industrial schools run by religious congregations.
For now, the political spotlight has turned not so much on the final bill, but, rather, on the way in which the then government gave 18 orders of brothers and nuns an open-ended indemnity.
In recent days, the new leader of the Labour Party, Mr Pat Rabbitte, has with considerable success seized upon the issue, implying that details of the deal have only just emerged into the open.
He has created a picture that a sweetheart deal was spirited past the cabinet last June by Mr Michael Woods, with the connivance of the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in the last hours of that administration.
The reality is, however, more complicated.
News that the religious congregations had agreed to pay €128 million in cash and property to part-fund the Redress Board was revealed by the government on January 30th, 2002. The congregations offered to pay €26 million in cash, €12.7 million for educational programmes for victims of abuse, €10 million for counselling services, and a further €80 million worth of property.
The list of properties would include those signed over to the State since May 11th, 1999 - the date of the Taoiseach's apology to all those abused because of the negligence of the State.
All of this was known 13 months ago. Not yesterday. Not last week. More than a few eyebrows were then raised, but the Opposition's full and open fury was not aroused. However, it now believes that the Government is vulnerable in a way that it was not then.
Talks between the Department of Education and Science, the Attorney General's Office and the Department of Finance, on one hand, and the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) began in November 2000. From the beginning, CORI played hardball.
On the one hand, the congregations could see benefits in being involved in a State-run compensation scheme, rather than facing years of court battles. On the other, CORI wanted to pay as little as possible.
In the Dáil yesterday, the Taoiseach said the government had driven the negotiations because it wanted to pay compensation to generations of people badly treated by the State.
But the government operated by certain "guiding considerations" during the negotiations, he declared. "The State was looking for a voluntary contribution. It could not compel the congregations to pay. It did not want to put such a burden on the congregations that they were put out of business.
"The religious congregations were quite happy to go case by case into the courts. It was the government that was not. I was the one who was not prepared to go on saying to these people that the State did not care two damns about them.
"We made the system easy so that these people could get their money, rather than going to the courts. I make no apology to anybody about what the last government did," he told Mr Rabbitte.
Given such "guiding considerations", which presumably became evident to CORI during 18 months of negotiations, it is perhaps a miracle that the State was not even more generous to the congregations.
Certainly, the Department of Finance wanted the congregations tied into a 50/50 deal, irrespective of the final scale of the bill, although CORI successfully stonewalled this demand from the very beginning.
Despite Mr Ahern's assertion in the Dáil yesterday, the government did not need the agreement of the congregations, or contributions from them, to set up the Redress Board.
The government could have set it up, paid out compensation over the next couple of years and then sued the congregations to within an inch of their lives in subsequent court actions.
Elsewhere, the issue threatens to bankrupt the Catholic Church. In one Canadian state, the courts ridiculed the suggestion that the state should split liability equally with the religious orders.
The State could have accepted that the congregations were not in a position to pay more than the €41.4 million cash contribution finally agreed last June, but, instead, sought the transfer of much more property.
In days of yore, the congregations owned and controlled most of the country's schools and provided many of the staff. Today, a Christian Brother at the head of a class is a rare sight. Yet, the church still wields power, and power with representation, in the schoolyard.
Once the broad outline was agreed between CORI and the government, which made it clear that the congregations would be indemnified, both sides engaged in six months more of talks to put flesh on the bones of the deal. Although access to files on the affair repeatedly sought under the Freedom of Information Act have been refused, it seems too incredible to believe that Mr Woods was let go off on a solo run.
Indeed, the list of documents refused under the FOI request indicates that senior officials in the Attorney General's Office, the Department of the Taoiseach, Education and Finance, were closely involved.
The final package came back before the last cabinet on June 5th 2002, its last day of office, although the paperwork had been circulated over a week before, Mr Woods told The Irish Times yesterday.
Did the cabinet take its eye off the ball?
Some ministers were looking forward to new briefs. Others, including Mr Woods, were looking at the end of their careers. The full publication of the files would help to answer some questions.
Faced with renewed interest in the compensation deal, the Government has argued that the State is completely liable because it failed to protect the children under its care.
Doubtless, the State is culpable. Mr Woods has argued that it had no choice but to agree a deal with the congregations because the details held on the Department of Education's files were so "awful".
However, Mr Eoin O'Sullivan, a social policy lecturer in Trinity College, Dublin, disagrees. "I don't accept for a moment that the Government should have to pay all, or nearly all, of the bill. The Department of Education is deliberately misrepresenting the files.
"There is nothing on the files to indicate that the State knew that there was child abuse going on. There is nothing there to show that," said Mr O'Sullivan, who was involved in RTÉ's States of Fear programme.
Whether good, or bad, the State is stuck with the deal. Now the important question is how many people will lodge claims with the Redress Board. The Department of Education says approximately 5,000.
However, Mr O'Sullivan points out that 40,000 went through the industrial and reformatory schools between 1940 and 1970. Many of them are dead. Thousands more were sent there by local health boards.
Under its founding rules, the Redress Board can pay up to €300,000, and more in exceptional cases. It can also offer small amounts to those sent to industrial schools who were never actually abused.
If it adopts the latter course and compensates the vast majority of those who come before it, then the brothers and nuns should truly pray nightly in gratitude for the Government's kindness.