Child abuse report - We must pay due debt for great wrong

AS with more or less every other conversation in this country it was not too long before we focused on the money.

We can’t be shocked but we might just be a tad surprised that in the face of the appalling, inhuman abuses, the savagery and torture revealed by the Commission to Inquire in to Child Abuse that money so quickly became a central issue.

This, despite the shaming fact that we – the state, all its agencies and citizens – turned a blind eye to the torture inflicted on desperate children in need of no more than the little protection any civilised society would gladly afford them.

The only comfort we can allow ourselves is that however badly we behaved the Catholic Church behaved even more appallingly. Most certainly the savages wore cassocks but it was a feeble and compliant state that directly supported – financially and legally – the institutions that hosted these litanies of horror.

It was not a case of throwing Christians to the lions but rather a case of throwing children to them. The children were martyred because of their poverty and our indifference. In this context it may be less than fair to attack the Catholic Church for the deal it secured from Bertie Ahern’s 2002 government on the very last day it was in office. The deal capped compensation the Church it might pay victims of abuse at €128 million.

The 11th-hour nudge-nudge collaboration agreed by former education minister Michael Woods was a failure of government, maybe even a remnant of the culture of deference and abject subservience that facilitated the torture in the first place.

It rubbed salt into wounds already deep enough.

Already we hear calls for the deal negotiated by Sister Elizabeth Maxwell and Sister Helena O’Donoghue on behalf of 18 religious orders to be revisited with a view to getting the Church to pay more. Of course the Church should pay much, much more but the state is culpable too and we must recognise that.

When that disastrous Woods deal was finalised it was opposed by the Department of Finance. Neither the department nor the Attorney General, chief legal adviser to the Government, were involved in the negotiations. This puts it in the all too familiar category of a rearguard stroke pulled by Fianna Fáil to placate powerful interests found out in wrongdoing.

In any event, all this argument about revisiting the deal could be academic. If all the expressions of regret and shame, of pain and anger offered by the country’s leading Catholic churchmen – even the Christian Brothers have acknowledged great wrongs – on the publication of Mr Justice Seán Kelly’s report were as deep and heartfelt or as culture changing as we have been encouraged to believe, then the Church will recognise that it should pay much, much more than 10% of the final abuse bill.

The reality is that the Catholic Church has not yet met its obligations under the get-out-of-jail deal agreed with Woods and Ahern seven years ago.

Of the €66m pledged in property transfers, less than €20m has been signed over. About another €10m or so is tied up in paperwork and there are difficulties with other properties.

As ever, actions speak louder than words.