COMPENSATION:TÁNAISTE EAMON Gilmore has said he "would be very disappointed if the religious orders decided not to engage" in discussions next Friday with Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn.
“I can’t see how it is to their advantage,” he said in Brussels yesterday where he was attending a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Mr Gilmore was responding to yesterday's report in The Irish Timesthat representatives of some of the 18 congregations that managed residential institutions for children investigated by the Ryan commission may not attend a meeting with Mr Quinn next Friday in protest.
They have been invited to the meeting to discuss a € 200 million shortfall in an expected 50:50 contribution by them to costs incurred by the State in compensating former residents of the institutions. The Government is asking congregations named in the Ryan report to transfer ownership of schools to the State to help make up the shortfall.
Last week Mr Quinn said: “I’m asking them for a 50:50 contribution. The taxpayer has already paid out the bulk of it. Their share should be about € 680 million and they are half shy of that . . . they need to do far more.”
The congregations have insisted to The Irish Times they never agreed to make a 50:50 contributions to such State costs, nor was this a recommendation of the report. It is also their intention to ensure any additional contributions they make would go to survivors and not to the State.
Yesterday Mr Gilmore said “the 50:50 split was not put on the table last week. It’s been around for some time.”
Meanwhile Christine Buckley of the Aislinn centre, who had been abused as a child in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage, said she was “extremely alarmed” to hear some of the congregations did not intend attending the scheduled meeting with Mr Quinn. She and other survivor representatives have been invited to meet the Minister on Friday morning and intend doing so, he said. His meeting with the religious congregations is scheduled for that afternoon.
Ms Buckley found the congregations’ explanation for not attending “unconvincing” where the property end of their further contributions was concerned.
She noted that in the 2002 indemnity deal they agreed to contribute €128 million towards redress, €35 million in cash, €12.9 million towards the education of survivors, and €10 million towards counselling services for survivors and the rest in property.
She also found it “perplexing” that Mr Justice Seán Ryan had not made a recommendation in his report that the congregations pay half the costs incurred as a result of abuse in the institutions.
She recalled her surprise at his appointment to chair the child abuse commission as he had previously been involved with establishing the redress board and its weighting system for assessing compensation where survivors of the institutions were concerned.
A spokesman for Mr Quinn said he would not be commenting on these matters before his meetings on Friday.