The Government's plans to set up a board to award compensation to people abused in residential homes run by religious orders are "seriously flawed", the Catholic hierarchy has warned.
The Residential Institutions Redress Bill must be amended, the Auxiliary to the Archbishop of Dublin, Bishop Eamonn Walsh told TDs and senators yesterday.
Once established, the redress board will hear cases in private, though victims will not be able to appeal the size of an award to the High Court. Bishop Walsh, along with members of the hierarchy's Child Protection Office, presented a submission paper to the Oireachtas Committee on Education and Science. The submission charged that the board would accept "hearsay evidence" and operate without "requiring any clear or adequate standard of proof and without formal testing of evidence.
"There is too serious a risk. The effect and resulting public perception will be of a blanket finding of liability against all or any institutions concerned and, in effect, all who worked in them . . . We are seriously concerned however that the proposed Bill in its present form will tarnish unjustly the life work of whole congregations of religious," it continued.
The Minister for Education and Science, Dr Woods, last February said the Redress Board would be headed by a former judge and offer compensation without laying blame. Victims' groups, such as Right to Place and Survivors of Child Abuse are increasingly concerned, in the wake of the failure to have the body established by the summer.
Mr John Morgan of the hierarchy's Child Protection Office said that the church would not shield child abusers, "even if that is not the public perception".
He urged TDs to back an amendment that would require the board to inform people of any accusations made against them, and to give them a chance of reply.
Such a course, he said, would mean that the board could operate in a non-adversarial way, because those accused would not have an automatic right to cross-examine. "People would have to make an application to cross-examine. We could probably avoid this in most cases. But it would allow the board to test the evidence."
Bishop Walsh told Fine Gael TD Mr Michael Creed that "the other tribunals working in this town" would not operate according to the legal standards proposed for the board. "This risk could lead to serious defamation against certain identifiable individuals," he said, adding that the fact that the board would meet in private would not be enough to protect reputations.
"The institutional abuse among relevant religious congregations can be laid at the feet of a limited number of individuals. The price for the wrongs of the few is paid by all those associated with such groups." The Redress Board should not confine itself simply to institutions run by the religious, but to all day or residential institutions, run or regulated by the State.
