The State compensation scheme for victims of institutional child abuse has made awards of just under €150 million to date to nearly 2,000 former residents of children's institutions. Liam Reid reports.
According to the latest figures released by the Residential Institutions Redress Board, it has held hearings into the cases of 1,939 people, and made individual awards of up to €300,000.
In one case it decided to make no award following a full hearing, while two applicants have refused to accept awards made to them.
The board has refused applications from 71 individuals, because the institutions the individuals attended were not covered by the scheme.
The average award made is €77,000, which does not include the legal and other administrative costs, estimated by the Comptroller and Auditor General to be €15,600 per case.
The board said it had received 4,633 applications to date, and "continues to receive applications at a steady rate".
The majority of the awards to date - 1,157 - have been for amounts of between €50,000 and €100,000. A total of 328 people have been awarded amounts of less than €50,000, while 383 received between €100,000 and €150,000 and 60 between €150,000 and €200,000.
Only 11 people have been given awards of over €200,000, with a maximum amount of €300,000 awarded in one case.
In its latest newsletter the board also warned that, under the legislation covering the scheme, applicants were prohibited from publicising the fact that they had been before the board.
It said that while it welcomed scrutiny of its decisions and scrutiny of its actions, those found in breach faced a jail term of up to two years or fines of up to €25,000.
"An applicant may still publicise his or her experiences in an institution but must not include any information relating to the fact of an application to or award by the board," the newsletter said.
The new figures are the first to be published since the annual report of the C&AG, which estimated that the potential final number of claimants could be around 8,900, at a potential cost of €828 million.
In its annual report last year, the board itself estimated the number of potential claimants at between 6,500 and 7,000, costing up to €650 million.