The Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, is expected to respond in the next few days to demands that responsibility for the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse be taken from him and his Department.
Opposition politicians and abuse victims yesterday insisted that the inquiry be taken away from the Department of Education and given to the Department of the Taoiseach after Miss Justice Laffoy strongly criticised the Government, the religious congregations and the lawyers in the commission's third interim report, published yesterday.
There was no response from Mr Dempsey, whose spokeswoman said he was studying the report which singles out his Department for criticism.
The judge, whose resignation as chair of the commission came into effect last month, said it had had no real independent capacity to perform its statutory functions since early June 2002. The organs of State either did not make the necessary decisions, or did not make them quickly enough.
"The committee is not satisfied that, since its establishment, it has received the level of co-operation which it is entitled to expect to receive from the Department of State which is its statutory sponsor," the report said. Miss Justice Laffoy resigned over what she said was an inability to carry out her mandate. The commission's problems also emanated from the attitude of the survivors' solicitors to compensation, she said, and the attitudes of lawyers for other parties involved to the State's liability for legal representation costs.
Fine Gael's education spokeswoman Ms Olwyn Enright said last night that Mr Dempsey had "lost all credibility" in the matter. She said neither he nor his predecessor, Dr Michael Woods, resourced the commission properly, nor enabled their own Department to respond to it properly. Labour's spokeswoman Ms Jan O'Sullivan said the report had put on the record "the shocking catalogue of delay and obstruction the commission faced from the Fianna Fáil/PD government that eventually forced the resignation of Miss Justice Laffoy as chairperson".
Meanwhile, in its first and only report so far into specific allegations, the commission found evidence of neglect, emotional, sexual and physical abuse at an industrial school in west Cork in the 1930s and 1940s. "Severe physical punishment was a constant feature of discipline" at Baltimore Fisheries School.
There was one serial abuser on the staff of the school during the period, and "as a matter of probability" other abusers. The sexual abuse included buggery, and was accompanied by "aggression and violence", while the committee also found that older boys abused younger residents at the school.