Kevin Myers argues that when governments announce that something is going to cost somewhere in the range between €X and €Y, we can be sure that the final figure will be far higher than €Y, while €X is just about as relevant as Lima's budget deficit.
Politicians, after all, are politicians, and they hate confronting bad news, until finally it creeps up and sandbags them. Ideally, it'll steal up and mug their successors in the distant future, while they sit and sneer from the Opposition benches.
All that by means of a prelude to this: a gold guinea to a brass farthing that the compensation scheme for children abused in religious institutions will cost far more than €500 million, the upper figure quoted by the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, recently. (And as for his lower figure of €200 million: ha! - tell that to the Peruvian Marines).
He - poor lamb - seems to think these things can be kept in check, whereas the Army deafness claims have shown the opposite: they are controllable neither in the pay-outs resulting, nor in the numbers of plaintiffs presenting themselves, nor in the greed of lawyers whose nostrils, alert as a condor's, can scent, at vast distances, the merest molecule of that tasty carrion called public money.
Shrewd deal
So CORI - the Conference of Religious in Ireland - negotiated itself a very shrewd deal indeed when it agreed a settlement with the Government whereby it will pay no more than €128 million compensation to people abused in childhood by religious institutions. The bulk of the damages, however much that might be - the length of a piece of string? - will be paid by the Government.
Though the abuse was certainly not by government employees, the State paid capitation fees for the orders to mind the children, and some religious organisations made a great deal of money out of the arrangement. Infant laundresses can turn a pretty penny, provided you get them out of bed early and don't let them over-eat.
Yet both the State and the public were happy to accept the insistence from these religious institutions that they alone were suited to mind young Catholic orphans. The little bastards were something of a public nuisance, after all, and it made sense of a kind for the clergy to keep them and their chilblains out of sight, out of mind, in stone cold institutions, up until adulthood, when they could be shipped off to Britain to become prostitutes, soldiers, winos or tramps - anything, so long as they vanished.
Now, no one comes out of this business very well, and the simplest and most unproductive response to those terrible times is to blame the clergy. They were not Martians who arrived in capsules, their heads full of strange notions about the way Irish humans should be treated. They were Irish people, raised in Irish homes, applying principles which in broad stroke, if not in every tiny detail, were accepted by the governments of Ireland.
Choice properties
Simultaneously, these religious institutions were rather good at extracting money from the Irish people. In fact, they were very good, and not just since Independence, but long before then. For over 150 years, various religious orders accumulated vast amounts of money and huge land-banks, which in time turned out to be some of the choicest properties in Ireland.
This gives a flavour of their riches. Four years ago, Loreto Abbey Rathfarnham sold 14 acres of land for €26 million. The Legionnaires of Christ received nearly €32 million for 20 acres at Leopardstown, and the Religious of Christian Education pocketed nearly €18 million for seven acres at Bushy Park.
Three years ago, the Sisters of Mercy sold three acres to St Andrew's School for €7.6 million, and the Vincentians of Castleknock received nearly €16 million for 35 acres with poor access. But best of all was the nearly €46 million the Religious Sisters of Charity were able to squirrel into their capacious habits for 14.5 acres of juicy Dublin 4 turf.
These deals accumulated €17.6 million for a handful of orders more than the proposed total pay-out by all orders to the victims of institutional abuse. And transactions would have gone through with next to no tax, as religious are registered charities. What's more, religious orders still own vast amounts of prime land, groaning for planning permissions (contact Prisoner X2345, Mountjoy Jail for further details) all around Dublin.
The clergy remains perhaps the most capital-rich social group in Ireland, in addition to the vast fortunes realised during the land-boom of the past half-decade. The church's assets are vast, yet it fought like a tiger to shift the majority of the financial consequences of what was done to infants by its members away from itself, and onto the taxpayers on Ireland.
Homilies on tax
OK. Nice going if you can get it. But does this now mean that CORI, having striven so hard to stick us PRSI cannon-fodder for the bill resulting from child abuse by the clergy, will henceforth spare us all its regular homilies about the duty of taxpayers to pay more and more tax? For CORI-folk do not even pay tax as the rest of us do; but conversely, most of us do not own fat, succulent hectares in Rathfarnham or Donnybrook, as valuable as Kuwait, with which to buttress our old age.
CORI: we've seen you at work, minding your lucre. Allow the rest of us to follow your example. Most of all: please, please, no more sermons.