The State has been exposed to potentially horrendous costs because of an agreement reached between the former Minister for Education, Dr Woods, and the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI).
Under the deal - ratified in the dying days of the last government - the religious orders agreed to pay €128 million to cover claims of physical and sexual assault against their members, involving children and young adults placed in institutional care. The no-fault settlement covered all liabilities. The State agreed to pay any excess. Unofficial estimates have since indicated a final cost ranging from € 500 million to €2 billion.
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, defended the Government's actions in the Dail yesterday. It had looked for a voluntary contribution from the religious orders, he said, and had not wanted to place such a financial burden on them that it would put them out of business. The religious orders, he said, had been prepared to contest the issues on a case-by-case basis in the courts. But the Government was not.
On the basis of those comments, the Government - and the taxpayer - may have been the victims of a clever bluff. Certainly, CORI secured an extraordinarily generous deal that has no match elsewhere in the world.
There is no denying the State had a duty of care to the children it sent to a variety of institutions. And successive governments failed to discharge that responsibility. Thousands of persons were physically and sexually abused and psychologically damaged. The need for radical intervention was urged at the time by a number of government inspectors and was ignored. Successive governments were not prepared to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church.
Now that public scandal has emerged full-blown from the ashes of the past, the Government is repeating old patterns. The precise detail of the negotiations and of legal documents has been withheld from the Labour Party, along with the number of cases now pending and the likely cost. The Taoiseach is absolutely correct, however, when he says the financial settlement was not a secret deal. The terms were published early in 2002 and were criticised in the Dail. But Mr Ahern has offered no explanation why a proposal from the Department of Finance to share the financial burden equally with the religious orders was dropped. Nor why Dr Woods pushed the agreement through on his last day in Cabinet.
The deal between the Government and the religious orders does not represent an equitable sharing of responsibilities. The State may have committed young people to these institutions, but they were owned, staffed and run at a profit by the orders concerned. The financial resources of the orders are finite. And, from the outset, CORI was determined to minimise costs. It was enormously successful. The government's generosity has left the taxpayer terribly exposed. It should revisit the situation.