RYAN COMMISSION:THE GOVERNMENT publications office was yesterday awaiting delivery of hundreds more copies of the child abuse report after it ran out of stock due to "exceptional" demand.
Huge public interest has also put the Ryan commission’s website under severe strain, with additional servers and bandwidth being added to cope with unexpectedly high visitor numbers.
Some 90,000 separate downloads of the report were logged in the first 24 hours after the publication of the report two weeks ago, and 183,000 files have been downloaded in all. The company which hosts the website said it had “never seen anything like it”, a commission spokeswoman said.
The commission, which continues to receive new requests for the document every day, expects delivery of the second batch of its 2,500-copy print run in the coming days. “By the time the remainder of the print run comes in, we’ll have gone through most of them,” the spokeswoman said.
Applicant witnesses, survivors’ groups and Government departments are provided with copies free of charge, while the publications office charges €20 for a hard copy set or €10 for the disk. It already has a waiting list of between 400 and 500 names for hard copies of the five-volume set.
“Government publications have told us they have an extraordinary demand for it, and we were put under considerable pressure for it – more so than we expected,” the commission spokeswoman said.
“We knew the survivors’ groups wanted quite a few copies, but I think even they were taken by surprise, because they kept upping the numbers they wanted.”
A source in the publications office said the level of interest was so high that it would take as many copies as the commission could provide. “There is a huge demand for it. We’re still getting phone calls every day from people inquiring about when it will be in, how can they order it.”
Visitor traffic to the commission’s website was so high in the first 24 hours after publication that the company that hosts the site made additional servers and bandwidth available. “The people who host our website said they had never seen anything like it,” the spokeswoman added.
The most popular chapter among visitors to the site is volume three, chapter seven, which details the confidential committee hearings on male witnesses’ accounts of abuse.