COMPENSATION: TÁNAISTE EAMON Gilmore has said he
“would be very disappointed if the religious orders decided not to
engage” in discussions next Friday with Minister for Education Ruairí
Quinn.
“I can’t see how it is to their advantage,” he said in
Brussels on Monday where he was attending a meeting of EU foreign
ministers.
Mr Gilmore was responding to a report in
The Irish Times that representatives of some of the 18
congregations that managed residential institutions for children
investigated by the Ryan commission may not attend a meeting with Mr
Quinn next Friday in protest.
They have been invited to the
meeting to discuss a € 200 million shortfall in an expected 50:50
contribution by them to costs incurred by the State in compensating
former residents of the institutions.
The Government is asking
congregations named in the Ryan report to transfer ownership of schools
to the State to help make up the shortfall.
Last week Mr Quinn
said: “I’m asking them for a 50:50 contribution. The taxpayer has
already paid out the bulk of it. Their share should be about € 680
million and they are half shy of that . . . they need to do far more.”
The
congregations have insisted to The Irish Times they never agreed to
make a 50:50 contributions to such State costs, nor was this a
recommendation of the report. It is also their intention to ensure any
additional contributions they make would go to survivors and not to the
State.
Mr Gilmore said “the 50:50 split was not put on the table last week. It’s been around for some time.”
Meanwhile
Christine Buckley of the Aislinn centre, who had been abused as a child
in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage, said she was “extremely alarmed” to
hear some of the congregations did not intend attending the scheduled
meeting with Mr Quinn.
She and other survivor representatives have been
invited to meet the Minister on Friday morning and intend doing so, he
said. His meeting with the religious congregations is scheduled for that
afternoon.
Ms Buckley found the congregations’ explanation for
not attending “unconvincing” where the property end of their further
contributions was concerned.
She noted that in the 2002 indemnity
deal they agreed to contribute €128 million towards redress, €35 million
in cash, €12.9 million towards the education of survivors, and €10
million towards counselling services for survivors and the rest in
property.
She also found it “perplexing” that Mr Justice Seán Ryan
had not made a recommendation in his report that the congregations pay
half the costs incurred as a result of abuse in the institutions.
She
recalled her surprise at his appointment to chair the child abuse
commission as he had previously been involved with establishing the
redress board and its weighting system for assessing compensation where
survivors of the institutions were concerned.
A spokesman for Mr Quinn said he would not be commenting on these matters before his meetings on Friday.