Focus on redress: ‘Aftershocks’ of residential abuse reverberate
In total, the Residential Institutions Redress Board has paid out €970.03m to the thousands abused in Ireland's residential institutions. And yet, many think of the compensation as "dirt money" because they never felt their testimonies to the commission were believed.
This feeling is not the only one that haunts them from their nightmare experiences in the institutions.
Maria Byrne is trying to navigate the stairlift in her Navan Road home in Dublin, a necessity after busting her ankle for the third time in recent years. She’s mastered it, despite muttering “fecking stairlift” as she makes her way to her room.
If only navigating the redress scheme had been as easy.
“I was very emotional,” Maria, now 57, explains. “I had a solicitor and she didn’t do much for me. My brother got more than I did, I got tuppence.”
State institutions had a grip over Maria’s entire family. Her own mother, now 89, had been in an industrial school in Clonakilty. Maria isn’t quite sure as to how she came to stay at the Daughters of Charity in Chapelizod - “my ma couldn’t cope or something” - but nevertheless, she was there between the ages of six and 18. “It was hell,” she says. Her brother was with the Christian Brothers.
Maria attended redress quite late in the scheme, in 2015, and at the time was undergoing counselling.
She said:
“I wasn’t fit enough to go in because I was very emotional at the time, I was only going through counselling at the time and that was me.”
Since she felt unable to attend in person, it was left to the barrister and solicitor. It’s fair to say she was not happy with the result, and she believes that had she suggested rescheduling it wouldn’t have worked. “They just give you a date there and then and then you are up.”
She has strong views on what a redress scheme should look like.
“I think the government should give them redress scheme money and listen to them and don’t interrupt them, let them have their freedom of speech,” she says.
“Residents of Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries and things never had freedom of speech, now we do have it, so why can’t the government listen to them?”
She was never in trouble with the law but is still bitter that she was “cast as a criminal” on her record when she entered the institution. “I think that is disgraceful,” she says.
One happier outcome was the success of counselling. “I find it very hard to trust, it won’t go away,” she says, but adds that one of her counsellors is now retired and they are best friends. “We go out once a month for tea.”
Maria is also in the High Hopes Choir, something she had wanted for a long time. “That was the happiest thing ever to get into,” she says. Even on a fractured ankle, she’s focussed on getting back with her friends. “I miss it and can’t wait to get back into it.”
Carmel McDonnell Byrne is now 65, and feels "lucky" to have made it this far. A co-founder of the Christine Buckley Centre and a former resident, like Christine, of Goldenbridge, she says: "Our clientele are dying, and quite young, they really are.
"Maybe our pension age should be brought down," she continues. "Most people aren't living to pension age. A lot of my siblings didn't make it."
This is what Carmel describes as the "aftershocks" of the abuse suffered by so many in residential institutions. Even now it haunts them. She says one of the biggest fears among survivors of her vintage is end-of-life care.
When your formative years were scarred by terror and violence, even a retirement village can seem scary. "The biggest worry at our age is are we going to be institutionalised again," she says.
The aftershocks are never-ending, in part because, for many people, the redress system was not a balm to the hurt of those years spent in residential institutions, but an adversarial crucible in which many felt they were not believed. Carmel refers to the "two-tier" commission to investigate abuse, one which was confidential and which she describes as being open and accommodating to survivors, and the other, more investigative forum, which she said many people found extremely difficult.
Redress first came in the form of the Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB). It certainly brought comfort to some, but according to Carmel, not all. "People never felt they were believed," she says. "They felt they were dirty." Hence the description by some of the money received as "dirt money".
In 2018, according to the RIRB's last annual report, it processed one award which was related to an award made by the Review Committee, bringing to 16,650 the total number of awards it processed over its lifespan.
It had received 14,439 applications by the first cut-off point in December 2005, and a further 2,766 by the end of 2016 for those with exceptional circumstances, most of which were accepted.
According to the last annual report, 12,016 offers/awards were made following settlement and 2,994 awards were made following hearings. Just 17 awards in total were rejected by applicants but more than 1,000 were withdrawn, refused or resulted in a nil or no award.
The sum total paid out was close to €1bn - €970.03m. The average value of awards was €62,253, the largest award being €300,500. However, the legal fees paid out also captured headlines. Back in 2016 it was revealed that 1,000 firms had by then shared €200m - an average of €200,000 per firm. One firm which represented more than 1,000 clients received €18.8m.
The Education and Finance Board was set up after RIRB, to provide educational grants to survivors and their family members, but as Carmel describes it "then the money ran dry" - "the religious never paid enough money to people living in awful conditions, and the money wasn't great".
In her Chief Executive's message in the last ever Caranua annual report, Rachel Downes wrote that, while proud of the organisation's achievements, she is sad about its closure. "I believe there is more work to be done to support survivors," she said. Regrets; they've had a few.
Caranua was set up in 2012 to manage €110m, pledged by congregations, to provide practical assistance to applicants.
As recently as last year, 1,148 support payments were made to 591 survivors - down considerably on the 9,030 payments to 2,255 applicants in 2019, but still a significant outlay. As of February of this year, Caranua had facilitated €97.4m into services for survivors, led by €68.2m on housing and €27.3m on health.
It wasn't plain sailing. Three years ago two Caranua board members, Thomas Cronin and Dr Mary Lodato, themselves survivors of institutional abuse, quit and said the body should be shut down over what they called the "mistreatment" of survivors. It followed controversial comments a year earlier, in 2017 - later withdrawn unreservedly - by then-chief executive Mary Higgins that some survivors would "never be happy".
Just last month, Mr Cronin lodged a case against the State with the High Court over legal aid provisions and a ‘gagging order’ making it a criminal offence for survivors to divulge how much compensation they received under the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme.
And, on a more prosaic but still important level, according to a spokesman for the survivors' group RISN, some believe the works done for and paid by Caranua were not of the required standard. It's a saggy end to decades of redress schemes that have undoubtedly worked for some, but not all.
Did the residential redress schemes do right by those who needed help? In 1999 the RTÉ documentary States of Fear was screened to widespread shock and prompted the Taoiseach at the time, Bertie Ahern, to issue an apology and pledge to address past injustices.
It led to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the redress scheme, an alternative to the courts but a system which, in the words of RISN spokesman Mark Vincent Healy, was "not fit for purpose from day one", likening the experience to a job interview where various boxes had to be ticked.
"I think applicants should have had better support and been better prepared for it, rather than go to the solicitor, give statements, and [then] to the redress board," he says.
He believes if this type of support had been frontloaded for survivors, it would have helped many to come to a more rounded answer to the questions of "how do you feel about your actual past? How do you feel you could be actually redressed?"
And of course, the commission did not hold anyone to account for crimes committed against survivors. "This is one of the first things that should have been done," he says.
Carmel agrees. She believes that any future redress mechanism must achieve clear aims: that it be non-adversarial, that there be "no secret deals", and that "people have to be held accountable".
She believes a survivor who has already been through redress should be included. And, she says, counselling services need not only to be offered, but expanded, believing there is little point in having people who need access to treatment being plonked on lengthy waiting lists to be seen.
The aftershocks continue. As Carmel points out, one recurring problem is people complaining that their hearing is going, a legacy of being "battered from behind". It's more than a little ironic, given how many survivors feel they were never listened to.
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