Call for AG to examine deal

THE Attorney General must examine the controversial deal signed between the Church and State to compensate victims of sex abuse in religious institutions, the Labour Party insisted yesterday.

Following the landmark High Court award of over €300,000 paid to a child abuse victim by the Dublin diocese, the deal between 18 religious orders and the State must be re-examined, Labour’s justice spokesman Joe Costello said.

Mr Costello called on the religious orders to renegotiate this deal because he claims they are not paying a fair share of the compensation.

“I believe that responsibility for the abuse that was carried out in these institutions should be borne 50:50 by both the religious orders who ran them and the State which had statutory responsibility,” he said.

Under that deal, the religious orders agreed to pay €128 million in cash and property to the State towards the cost of compensating the victims abused in their institutions. In return, the religious orders were given a blanket indemnity from any further action by those victims.

But since that deal was signed last June the estimated cost of compensating these victims has rocketed to over €1 billion, Mr Costello said.

The Residential Institutions Redress Board, set up to hear the claims, has had more than 1,000 people contact them weekly since they started advertising at the beginning of January. And the landmark High Court award will now become a benchmark for these people’s compensation claims, Mr Costello added.

“We now have a situation whereby the State will have to pay a disproportionate part of the compensation for offences committed by clerics and I do not think that is fair,” Deputy Costello said.

The Labour justice spokesman wants the Attorney General to examine the legal integrity of the deal struck between the 18 religious orders and former Education Minister Michael Woods in June, 2002.

Mr Costello will ask Justice Minister Michael McDowell to refer the Residential Redress Institutions Board agreement to the Attorney General. “The deal was signed without any real knowledge of its implications because there was no proper estimate of what it would cost,” he said.

Fine Gael education spokeswoman Olwyn Enright said she would be asking Education Minister Noel Dempsey to check the legality of the deal.

Meanwhile, Mr Costello called on the 18 religious orders who signed the deal with Mr Woods to voluntarily revisit these agreements. “The Church has a lot of valuable property and I see no reason why these assets could not be sold to pay for this compensation,” he added.

A spokesperson for the 18 religious orders, Sr Elizabeth Maxwell, declined to comment on the call for them to revisit the agreement signed with the State.