Abuse bill could be €120m over Government estimate

THE bill for compensating victims of abuse in State-run residential institutions could be €120 million more than the Government had first anticipated, the latest estimate shows.

The Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB), the independent body set up in 2002 to compensate those abused as children in State-run institutions, will stop accepting applications in December.

The RIRB expects to have received between 7,500 and 8,000 applications by that time, and believes the total compensation bill, including legal and administration costs, will reach between €680m and €730m.

Prior to the RIRB’s establishment, the Department of Education had estimated the bill for compensation would reach €508m, rising to €610m when legal and administration costs were factored in.

The RIRB’s latest estimate suggests the final bill could be between €70m and €120m more than the department’s initial forecast.

The Government has been heavily criticised since the establishment of the RIRB for underestimating the scale of the redress scheme. However, even if the final bill now appears likely to significantly exceed the department’s estimate, it should still be lower than was feared.

At one point, Comptroller and Auditor General John Purcell believed the bill would reach between €869m and €1 billion.

Mr Purcell subsequently revised this estimate downwards to between €700m and €828m.

Speaking in the Dáil last week, Education Minister Mary Hanafin stressed that the final cost of the redress scheme “must be viewed in the context of the Government’s concern to provide reasonable compensation towards the hurt and suffering experienced by victims of abuse and the very substantial costs that would have been incurred in any event if no such scheme had been established and if cases had been processed in the normal manner through the courts”.

Of the 5,909 cases submitted to the RIRB to date, awards have been made in more than 3,000, at a total cost of approximately €229m.

The highest award to date was €300,000, but the average payout is significantly less than that, at €78,000.