Religious orders - The groups must accept responsibility

The controversy over the amount of money the religious orders should pay to indemnify the state for compensation in relation to the abuse highlighted in the Ryan Report has no more to do with the tenets of faith or religion than the actual abuse had anything to do with religion.

What happened was an obscene contradiction and perversion of Christianity. It should be clearly recognised that it was all the worse because it was done in the name of Christianity. That is why it is so important that the whole issue should be cleared up.

There has been too much prevarication already. Good, idealistic people in the Church have been betrayed by their own administrators being more concerned with covering up the abuse, rather than dealing with the problems properly.

The cover-ups were undertaken without regard either for those who had been so vilely abused, or the outrageous way in which other totally innocent people were being exposed. Such behaviour exhibited a blend of greed, stupidity and criminal indifference.

In many cases, such as in the Magdalene Laundries, those being abused were effectively enslaved, and the religious orders perpetrating the abuses were enriched on the backs of their unfortunate victims. This was a gross injustice and must be recompensed. Nobody is suggesting those orders should now be impoverished but they — not the taxpayers — should compensate those who were so shamelessly exploited and abused.

The four orders who ran the Magdalene Laundries — Sisters of Mercy, Good Shepherd Sisters, Sisters of Our Lady of Charity and the Sisters of Charity — made over €296 million in property deals during the last decade. Those and the other 14 orders named in the Ryan Report made €667m from their property deals during the same period. Those various orders still hold over €3.1 billion worth of property and they have more that €700m in financial assets, so there is no financial insecurity.

Most of the property the religious orders offered to hand over has been educational, health and sporting facilities, while the bulk of the €219m worth of development and agricultural land has been excluded. Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has rightly insisted that the religious orders’ offers for meeting the cost of the €1.3bn redress bill are not sufficient. He proposed that much of the gap could be filled if the orders involved in education were willing to sign over schools to the legal ownership of the state.

In the last analysis, the real problem is not so much about money as it is a continuing failure of religious orders to accept responsibility for what was done. They must do that to put the whole thing behind them for once and for all.