The Catholic Church should have been forced to pay a lot more for its culpability in allowing abuse of children in its care to continue unchecked for years, suggests Mary Raftery.
The deal struck this week between Catholic religious congregations and the State over compensation to victims of institutional child abuse has once again focused attention on the issue of church-state relations in this country. It is a moment of brief and rare clarity, when we can gain some insight into the true extent of change within Irish society, or perhaps more accurately, the lack of change.
The deal now concluded with the religious orders is that they will contribute €128 million towards a compensation scheme for those abused as children in their care. At first glance, this represents roughly one-quarter of a total bill which could amount to around €500 million. The State, i.e. the taxpayer, will be responsible for 75 per cent of the total compensation pay-out. In return for their contribution to the compensation scheme, the Government has guaranteed indemnity from civil prosecution to the religious orders.
However, all is not quite what it seems. Analysis of the €128 million from the religious orders shows that in fact their actual direct contribution towards compensation is far below this figure.
Land transfers and sales to the State which have already happened (many at the inflated property values of two years ago) are included, together with amounts for counselling and record-retrieval which have already been spent by the orders. All of this was being undertaken long before there was any mention of compensation for the survivors of child abuse, and would have continued apace in the absence of any such issue.
But, even taking the figures at face value, it is worth analysing whether there is now a fair and appropriate apportioning of responsibility for the terrible abuse that wrecked the lives of so many of those committed to Catholic institutions as children.
With the State shouldering the greater part of the burden, the implication is that the Catholic Church was merely a minor player in the scandal of institutional child abuse in this country. The facts simply do not bear this out. It is clear at this stage that the State was indeed grossly negligent in the way in which it fulfilled its statutory duty to inspect and regulate the country's childcare institutions. Consequently, it is right that it should compensate the inevitable victims of this neglect.
However, neither the State nor any of its officials actually perpetrated on the children the atrocious acts of physical and sexual violence now so widely and extensively - and bravely - described by survivors.
These acts were carried out by nuns, brothers and priests, members of the religious orders so effectively represented by CORI, the Conference of Religious of Ireland. Evidence now beginning to leak from religious archival sources indicates clearly that within at least one of these congregations, the Christian Brothers, there was detailed awareness at the highest level of the sexual abuse by religious brothers of children, and, most importantly, the repeating nature of the offenders' behaviour, the criminality involved and the long-term harm caused to victims.
IT also appears that there was a pattern of transferring paedophile religious brothers into the industrial schools, where their criminal behaviour would be less likely to be detected by virtue of the secret and closed nature of these environments. Cut off from the outside world, their small victims simply had no one to tell about their lives of horror.
Traditionally, the religious orders have been notoriously secretive about their records. In the light of what is now emerging about the extent of their awareness of the prevalence of child abuse among their members, and crucially of their unwillingness to tackle the problem in any meaningful way, we can perhaps understand their reticence.
It certainly strongly contradicts the traditional Catholic Church response that they were not aware of such a thing as child sexual abuse or of its effects on victims.
So not only did members of religious orders directly carry out criminal acts of abuse on children within the institutions, the leaderships were aware of this and did not act to prevent it and protect the child victims.
In the light of this, it seems hardly either fair or appropriate that the State should assume the major share of the responsibility for such widespread child abuse, thus saving the Catholic Church millions of euro by way of compensation at the expense of the taxpayer.
The behaviour of the Irish State in this regard is directly at odds with that in other countries dealing with similar child abuse scandals. This, perhaps above all else, shines a harsh light on the true picture of church-state relations in 21st-century Ireland.
The Australian government has taken the extreme hardline view that religious orders charged with running some of its childcare institutions should be wholly responsible for the abuse and resulting compensation.
Interestingly, the religious orders most deeply involved in the Australian child-abuse scandals are the Irish congregations of the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers, both responsible for the lion's share of the Irish system and the abuses within it.
While the Australian approach is hardly humane, it is nonetheless an uncompromising statement of blame: that members of the religious orders concerned beat and raped children in their care and consequently should live with the consequences and pay out whatever compensation is owing.
The great difficulty with this approach, however, has been that the survivors have had to sue through the courts and have been forced to settle for amounts far below what they are entitled to.
In the Canadian province of Newfoundland, the government's approach was just as hardline towards the Catholic Church, but considerably more humane towards one particular group of abuse survivors. These were men who had grown up at the notorious Mount Cashel orphanage in St John's, where there was widespread sexual and physical abuse by the Christian Brothers who ran the institution.
The government of Newfoundland reached a direct compensation settlement with a group of about 40 of these survivors. It then sued the Christian Brothers for the full amount of this settlement. This in turn catapulted the Christian Brothers in Canada into liquidation in 1996. The sorry tale of the Christian Brothers' attempts to avoid their compensation responsibilities was the subject of the recent Betrayal programmes on RTÉ's Prime Time.
This option of suing the religious orders was always open to the Irish Government should it have been unhappy with the level of the orders' contribution to the compensation fund.
It is reasonable to argue that in the interests both of fairness and of the public purse, the Government should have insisted on a religious contribution of at least twice the current figure, and a contribution of real money as opposed to the smoke-and-mirrors PR exercise which we now have.
The Government had no such qualms about protecting taxpayers' money when it came to the hepatitis C scandal, as we can see unfolding on our screens through the weekly episodes of No Tears at the moment.
Here, the State aggressively and vindictively defended itself against victims who had an absolute right to compensation.
Shades of this attitude appear again in the likely exclusion from the abuse compensation scheme of children with disabilities who ended up in orthopaedic hospitals and in schools for deaf and blind children.
Abuse in some of these institutions was dealt with in States of Fear, and was severe.
However, when it comes to holding the Catholic Church to account, different standards appear to apply.
The State seems to have no difficulty in stepping in and shouldering a compensation burden which by right belongs in much greater part to the Catholic religious orders.
Since the foundation of the Irish State, successive governments have been happy to pay over large sums of money to the Catholic Church in return for the provision of social, health and educational services.
The church continues to own and control much of this infrastructure within the country and retains considerable wealth.
As with the industrial schools, when the State asked that the religious be accountable for the way this money was spent, their requests were imperiously rejected and the State told that this was none of its business.
Department of Education records show again and again that the State meekly accepted these stern rebuffs.
Now it appears that once again the State and the taxpayer are prepared to pay out the money while humbly permitting the Catholic Church to avoid the bulk of its liabilities.
The fact that the issue here is the criminal abuse of thousands of children within one of the most cruel environments this country is ever likely to see makes the scandal even worse.
It seems that the bad old days of the 1950s are, in this respect at least, still very much alive and well and living around the Cabinet table.
• Mary Raftery is the co-author of Suffer the Little Children - the Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools and the producer, director and writer of RTÉ's States of Fear.