Greg Daly
The drumbeat has grown incessant in recent months: religious congregations, we are told time and time again, agreed to pay half the cost of the State’s redress scheme for those who lived in industrial schools and similar institutions, and have not done so.
Technically, it is admitted, they only legally agreed to pay €128 million, but their greater obligation is a moral one: when the State made its plans for redress nobody could have expected how much redress would have been sought.
This ‘moral pressure’ needs to stop, according to a lengthy statement on the Irish website of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. “Morally speaking,” the statement says, “the Government should be helping the public to understand a complex situation, not confusing it.”
Claims
Although the statement is anonymous, signed by “an Oblate of Mary Immaculate”, it is presented as the view of the congregation, or at least its Irish province, being introduced with a summary that bills it as “our factual response” to Government claims, about which, it says, “the public are rightly concerned”.
In mapping the story of the official response to revelations about industrial schools, the statement says “the moral question first entered the public arena in the late 1990s with the voicing in the media of protests by people who had been in Government care in various institutions”, continuing, “These led – on May 11, 1999 – to the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern TD apologising to them and accepting State responsibility.”
This made sense: industrial schools and other residential institutions may have been run on a day-to-day basis by religious, but this was on behalf of the State and with the involvement of numerous arms of the State. In a sense the religious were merely the “foot soldiers” of the system.
Beyond an apology, the State undertook two substantive responses to the revelations, establishing the Laffoy – which later became the Ryan – Commission and separately enacting the Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002.
The statement says both the Government and Ms Justice Mary Laffoy wanted to wait until the investigation was completed before issuing compensation, but the Government decided otherwise because “Its hand was being forced by the refusal of victims’ groups, with the support of their legal representatives, to cooperate with an investigation unless such a scheme was put into immediate effect.”
Before the commission published its report in 2009, the Redress Board had already paid out millions of Euro both in awards and in legal costs wholly unrelated to the commission’s investigation; indeed, the statement says, the roles of the commission and the board were sharply distinguished, the two being “strictly forbidden” from sharing information with each other.
Now, of course, they are commonly conflated, their costs being added to the redress bill religious orders have a supposed ‘moral obligation’ to meet.
Initially the Government said the scheme was set up without regard to whether the religious would be involved, doing this against a background of over a thousand High Court cases pending against both the State and various congregations. It said the orders had then come on board, saying they wanted to make a “meaningful contribution” to the scheme, their contribution eventually being agreed as €128 million in “cash, counselling costs and real property”.
State witnesses told the commission in 2005 that though religious involvement was hoped for, the scheme was intended to go ahead even without it. The report never suggests that the State envisaged the religious orders as essential participants, let alone equal partners, in the scheme.
Rather, they were seen as adjuncts or contributors, the bulk of redress to be paid by the State that had mandated, sustained and supervised the residential institutions, sending children to them and requiring that they be kept there.
In 2002, the then Minister for Education and Science, Dr Michael Woods TD, told Ms Róisín Shortall TD the redress scheme was expected to cost €250 million, but could be double that.
If this happened, he said, Church bodies would end up having paid a quarter of the total redress, but the important thing, he said, was that the State was living up to its overall responsibility.
For Ms Shortall, this was unacceptable. “The deal will result in a huge bill for taxpayers, a bill that could eventually reach €1 billion,” she said, a concern that would have tallied with the fears religious congregations expressed to the Government in 2001 and 2002.
Despite the broad terms of the scheme, which was not tasked with making any findings regarding to fault or negligence, and which required that applicants supply no evidence of either, the Government was not worried about the number of applicants; this was before the financial crisis, and the Government was confident about the depths of its pockets.
“But unlike the Government, the religious were concerned about the number of applicants,” the statement says, commenting on the breadth of the scheme’s terms and continuing, “Surely no religious order could be an equal partner with the Government in such a fund! No religious order had a bottomless purse.”
Responsibility
The scheme as agreed, according to the Ryan Report, “was not based on any apportionment of responsibility for abuse”, and protected the congregations from being sued by past residents; without such protection, the statement argues, the religious could not have made a meaningful contribution to the scheme, as they would have needed to keep their financial reserves intact in case of legal action.
Things changed after the Ryan Report was published in May 2009, of course, and although the Government insisted that the 2002 agreement could not be reopened, ‘moral’ pressure began to be applied calling for a 50-50 sharing of costs. The Government was now facing far higher costs than it had expected at a time, following the financial crisis, when it was discovering its pockets weren’t as deep as it had thought.
Since then, the Oblate writes, the Government has “worked tirelessly to override the reality of the moral (and legal) situation as I have described it”.
Details
Pointing out that while the report’s central message should not be impugned, many of its details would not withstand judicial scrutiny, the statement notes that many religious feel ill-served by their treatment in recent years.
“In their minds their contribution to Irish society through their work in the orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories had been huge,” it observes, continuing, “they alone had been there to do something for the poor of Ireland, often at great personal cost to their members, in the times of great poverty that marked the founding years of the State, and indeed long before that in the British era.”
The spending of redress money on some of Ireland’s most vulnerable, the restoration of dignity through the commission’s inquiry, and the fact that a substantively true story was told by the Ryan Report are all, the statement says, things to celebrate.
However, it notes, the gap between how the religious see their history and its popular depiction nowadays is one that can only be addressed through serious historical work, and will only be resolved in time.