A serious rift over the workings of a proposed compensation body for abuse victims has emerged among organisations in the State dealing with the institutional abuse of children. Three of the main groups are threatening to withdraw support for a Government-sponsored national office to liaise with abuse victims if the group known as Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA) Ireland is represented on the management committee.
This emerged at a meeting in Cork last weekend, which included Right of Place, the Alliance for Healing of Institutional Abuse (Aislinn) and the UK-based SOCA group which is distinct from the Irish one.
Following the meeting, the three groups agreed the contents of a letter which was received by the legal officer of the Department of Education and Science, Mr Tom Boland, yesterday.
The three groups believe that Mr John Kelly of SOCA Ireland is anti-commission (of inquiry into child abuse). "He also believes that the group of solicitors should take the lead role with the Department of Education in negotiating on the tribunal of compensation. This is totally unacceptable to the above named groups."
"If Mr John Kelly is allowed to join the management committee of the new National Office, the leaders and members of the four main survivor groups (including, according to Right of Place, Alliance Ireland whose representative was unable to attend the Cork meeting) will not support the National Office."
When contacted over the weekend, Mr Kelly said the decision taken at the meeting did not surprise him. Right of Place, Aislinn and SOCA UK, were receiving Government funds, unlike Irish SOCA, and were too willing to comply with the wishes of the Department of Education which appeared to want to elicit submissions from victims on the structure of the compensation body without legal advice.
SOCA Ireland believed that such submissions should be made only after consultation with legal advisers. The Department of Education also wanted to cap the level of legal fees available to a panel of solicitors which would be available to represent the victims while the State itself, a defendant in the issue of institutional child abuse, would be free to pay for the best possible legal representation.
"The issues involved are complicated and our view is that without adequate legal advice, survivors would not be competent to deal with them. We feel the Department is trying to manipulate the way the compensation tribunal should work," Mr Kelly added.
Right of Place and the other two organisations which met in Cork, disagree fundamentally with Mr Kelly and say that having suffered abuse, victims are more than capable of making submissions on their own on the nature of that abuse. If necessary, legal advice could be called in but only on an agreed fee basis and not on a percentage of the final settlement.
"A figure of 10 per cent of the final compensation figure has been mentioned and I think that is outrageous. Our members haven't suffered and waited this long to see their settlements, if any, reduced by large legal fees," Mr Noel Barry, of Right of Place, said.
Despite the row, a consensus is now emerging among the four main groups on how compensation for victims should be handled by the Government. The organisations are adamant that where compensation is due to a victim who has since died, his or her spouse or named beneficiary will receive the money, backdated to May of last year when the Taoiseach made his public apology to victims on behalf of the Government.
In some cases, they believe that in the best interests of some of their members it would be more beneficial if regular payments could be arranged to meet the cost of "dignified and secure" housing and that a regular guaranteed income should be distributed through some form of trust to be established on behalf of the individual. The final say, however, will rest with the person who is due to receive compensation.
The legal services section of the Department of Education and Science has written to the various representative groups in the State asking for direct input on the question of how compensation should be paid. While the Government has already taken a decision in principle to establish the compensation body, its precise structure in law has not been defined and is unlikely to be before the new year.
According to the Department, the intention is that the compensation body will be structured to cover people who as children "were victims of abuse while in the care of institutions in which they were resident and in respect of which State bodies had regulatory or supervisory functions.
"Abuse will be defined as in the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Act 2000. It will cover sexual, physical and emotional abuse as well as neglect. Compensation will be paid to claimants who have established to the satisfaction of the compensation awarding body that he/she had suffered abuse and resulting damage."
Today in Ireland there may be as many as 3,000 people who are still alive to tell their stories of institutional abuse, sexual and otherwise, but for various reasons, not every one of them is a member of a help group. Between them, the four organisations claim to represent almost 2,000 people.
While the question of compensation is receiving much media attention, the real work of groups such as Right of Place is about helping "survivors" to reconstruct their shattered lives, says Mr Barry, whose own quest to learn about and understand his background was the driving force behind the setting up of the organisation.
Mr Barry says his own case is not unusual. It began when he was placed in the Passage West Orphanage in Cork, aged two years and three months. The court order under which he was admitted said that his mother was incapable of exercising proper guardianship. His only crime and hers, he says, was that he was born out of wedlock.
His brother Jimmy, was also institutionalised later but for many years, he was unaware that he had a brother and no one told him. His mother, Joan, fought hard to have her sons returned to her care and eventually succeeded, although he himself was subsequently ordered back to an institution by the authorities. He has never found out why and it has taken years of fighting the system to gain access to documents concerning his early life.
His mother died six years ago and while he had begun to build a relationship with her before her death, "she was only starting to open up" about the events all those years ago. He could not bring himself to ask her directly or address her as mother. "In letters, I always wrote to her as `dear mam', but when I met her, I could only call her Joan. That always affected me."
Right of Place has blossomed from an organisation dealing exclusively with the former inmates of St Patrick's Institution at Upton, near Cork city, to one which now has branches in many counties across the State.
Its outreach programme extends to Britain and the likelihood is that it will become a fully-fledged national organisation here. Its aims include counselling for victims, the provision of education which was "scandalously neglected" by the institutions, help with literacy, housing, rights and entitlements and vocational training. It has become a refuge for hundreds of people who have nowhere else to go.
The 10 full-time staff in the Cork offices are paid under the FAS programme and funding is provided by the Vocational Education Committee.