Ultra-conservative group got €16k in state funds

THE ultra-conservative Catholic group which attempted to prevent the Roscommon “house of horrors” children being taken from their parents received thousands of euro in state funds throughout the scandal.

The Irish Examiner has learned that the organisation, Ógeagras Naoimh Papain, has obtained more than €16,000 in financial support paid for by the taxpayer over the past decade.

The funds, from Dublin City Council (DCC) and the City of Dublin Youth Services Board (CDYSB), were legally provided under Government grants to help fund youth initiatives.

However, the vast majority of funding came after it emerged that the group was directly involved in attempts to keep the children with their abusive parents — including a DCC grant after their mother was jailed for seven years for horrific incest crimes.

According to records obtained by this newspaper the ultra-conservative Catholic group, based in Santry in Dublin, received €14,520 in City of Dublin Youth Services Board (CDYSB) grants between 2000 and 2008.

The money — which involved annual payments ranging between €1,320 and €3,720 for “youth work” programmes — were provided for by officials at the organisation, who have responsibility for delegating funding levels from a larger Youth Services Unit (YSU) grants pool.

The funds were effectively signed off by the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Health and Children, which had overall responsibility for the YSU during the period.

A second funding allocation of €500 was also provided for by Dublin City Council to the group for “a festival to promote the Irish language”.

This festival funding application was applied for in January 2009 and handed over to the group in June of that year — six months after the abused family’s mother was jailed.

According to the group’s application, this financial support was to be used to allow “local children from all schools to take part in solo singing, poetry and Irish instruments”.

At the time, the local authority provided grants on a case-by-case basis which were decided by an individual official, as “written criteria for approval of community grant applications did not exist”.

While it has since introduced new criteria for groups to apply for youth service grants, it is unknown whether the group is still receiving funding from the CDYSB.

A chief member of Ógeagras Naoimh Papain, 82-year-old Mína Bean Uí Chribín — who was named in court as the person who contacted health officials insisting the family should not be broken up — did not return phone messages from the Irish Examiner yesterday.

During the mother’s court case in January 2009, Ms Uí Chribín was named as the person who contacted a childcare manager claiming the family needed support and not intrusive action by the then health board.

She wrote the letter days after the abuse family’s self-confessed “worst mother in the world” secured a High Court injunction preventing the children being taken into care at the start of the decade.

Ms Uí Chribín had a high public profile in the 1980s and early 1990s, and was synonymous with campaigns against sex education, abortion and the use of contraception.

In anti-divorce campaigns in the early 1980s she referred to the term “one-parent family” as “the spate of fornication which followed hard on the heels of the contraception campaign”.

In the mid-1990s, the ultra-conservative Catholic also insisted that the small Irish school located on land in Santry owned by her adhere solely to traditional Tridentine faith Catholicism.