Sisters to face child abuse inquiry

THE latest public hearing into institutional child abuse will begin tomorrow when representatives of the Sisters of Charity make statements to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse about a Kilkenny industrial school run by them.

The commission’s investigation committee will hear from Sister Una O’Neill from the order, who are management respondents in relation to St Joseph’s industrial school. A transcript of the public hearing will be made available on the commission’s website.

However, this will mainly comprise background information about the school.

Further evidence presented to the commission in relation to specific allegations of abuse will be heard in private and details will not be published.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Mary Hanafin has ruled out establishing a compensation system for people abused as children at day schools.

Socialist TD Joe Higgins wants the Government to establish a redress board to compensate former pupils of non-residential institutions. This would work on a similar basis as the Residential Institutions Redress Board, the independent body set up in 2002 to compensate those abused in State-run industrial and reformatory schools.

However, Ms Hanafin has informed Mr Higgins in a written response to a parliamentary question that she has no plans to establish such a board.

The principal reason, she said, was that the children abused in residential institutions had been under the State’s care, whereas children attending day schools were under the guardianship of their parents.

“The Residential Institutions Redress Board was established as an alternative mechanism to the courts to provide financial redress to former residents of institutions who, as children, were abused while in institutions over which the State had a supervisory or regulatory responsibility,” she said.

“The rationale behind the setting up of the Redress Board was that children in the residential institutions were separated from their parents and therefore did not have the benefit of the care and protection which children in the care of their families usually enjoy.

“The institutions concerned controlled all aspects of the children’s lives 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with no reasonable capacity for access to, or involvement by, their parents.

“Therefore, the children in the institutions relied to a significant degree on the public bodies that had a statutory duty to protect them. This situation does not apply to children attending day schools who were enrolled there by their parents and continued to reside with their families under the guardianship of their parents.

“Accordingly, there are no plans to extend the remit of the Redress Board or to establish a similar board for pupils of day schools.”