Overseas abuse compensation applications rise

THE number of overseas applications for compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board could eventually outnumber those being made from within Ireland.

There has been a sharp rise in applications from abroad over the past three months.

The Board has launched an extensive advertising blitz in Irish centres in Britain and a spokesperson said yesterday that a media campaign has also begun in Australia.

A major law firm based in Western Australia, Ryan Carlisle Thomas, is representing 20 applicants.

In the United States, a number of seminars to track abuse victims have already been held in Boston and Chicago. More are planned for other parts of America and Europe.

Representatives of the survivors' group, Right of Place, spoke at the meetings to raise awareness of the entitlements available to successful claimants.

According to Right of Place, at least 150,000 children and teenagers went through orphanages, industrial schools and centres for young offenders with many suffering abuse at the hands of religious and others in charge of their care.

It is estimated as many as 100,000 left Ireland afterwards, with at least half believed to have travelled to the US. However, only a fraction of those are thought to be aware of the existence of the Redress Board.

The Board has sent posters, short guides to the redress scheme and handouts to Irish centres in Britain. According to a Board statement, it has asked that these documents be prominently displayed in the centres "in the hope that they will be seen by the maximum number of potential applicants".

An even more extensive advertising campaign for the UK is planned for the spring.

So far, the board has agreed to pay out more than €20 million in compensation to applicants found to have been abused.

That figure, however, could rise tenfold in view of the thousands of applications already received in the past year, and the board's requirement to pay applicants' legal costs.

Payments range from €10,000 to €240,000 and the average is €80,000.

In a statement, the Board said it continues to receive applications "at a steady rate". In the latter weeks of its first full year of operations it was receiving about 50 applications a week but that figure is now understood to have dropped off. It received a total of 2,553 applications for compensation to the end of December.

To date the Board has completed the process in 587 cases. More than 430 offers of compensation have been made following settlement talks and 104 awards have been made following hearings. Fifty two applications were refused.