Child abuse compensation bill to top €1bn
The bill to date for the Residential Institutions Redress Board is €714 million, including €91m in legal costs, according to Education Minister Mary Hanafin.
Her department now estimates that a further €428m is needed to meet the remaining awards, legal costs and administration expenses, bringing the final estimate to €1.14bn.
The figures provided in the Dáil last week almost exactly match the latest tally from the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) John Purcell in his annual report a fortnight ago. He said that, based on figures up to the end of last year, the likely final spend would be €1.16bn.
Mr Purcell made the same estimate at a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee a year ago, when senior Department of Education officials put the cost at €1.3bn, or €200m higher.
The C&AG’s office and the Government were in a dispute on the cost issue four years ago, when Mr Purcell’s €1bn upper estimate was strongly rejected by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
“Our view continues to be it will not be anything like what the eminent C&AG has said. We still believe it will be far smaller,” he told the Dáil in September 2003.
The Department of Education has been strongly criticised for the indemnity deal agreed with religious orders, whose members and staff carried out some of the abuse. They agreed to pay €128mn in a combination of cash and property as a contribution towards the final redress costs.
The board has received more than 14,500 applications for awards under the scheme set up in 2002 to help victims of child abuse in residential institutions in their recovery and improve the quality of the rest of their lives.
Almost 9,300 cases have been completed to date, according to Ms Hanafin’s reply to Labour Party TD Seán Sherlock, and they include 1,985 cases dealt with this year.
Legal and administrative expenses are running at about a fifth of the total cost of awards. The remaining 5,270 cases are likely to take another three years to complete, according to the latest estimates.
Ms Hanafin said the final cost of the redress scheme must be viewed in the context of the Government’s acceptance of its responsibilities in apologising to victims of abuse.
“One must consider that if the scheme had not been introduced, the State in all likelihood would have been engaged in civil court actions which would have been protracted and traumatic for the victims and would have resulted in the State incurring extensive legal and settlement costs,” she said.
* Applications: 14,546.
* Cases finalised: 9,276.
* Average award: €67,755.
* Highest award: €300,000.
* Figures take in period up until October 2, 2007.
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