AG advises Currie against supplying complete report

THE Minister of State for Child Care, Mr Austin Currie, has been advised it will not be possible to supply the unabridged version of the Madonna House report to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Family.

The advice has come from the Attorney General, Mr Dermot Gleeson, who warned that the two censored chapters of the report could not be put into the public domain in any circumstances.

The Irish Times has learned that a person had come forward in recent weeks with new evidence of abuse in Madonna House and that the gardai were examining the possibility of taking legal proceedings at this stage. This is believed to be the main ground on which Mr Gleeson issued his advice.

This development, according to informed sources, was only one of the reasons why the Madonna House report was different from the previously published Kelly Fitzgerald report.

These sources said the way in which the Madonna House report was written would make it impossible to delete names from the text. They also stated that the children who were victims of child abuse could be readily identified.

After the report was published with two key chapters missing last week, the Fine Gael TD, Mr Alan Shatter, who managed to circumvent the Government's original ban on publishing the Kelly Fitzgerald report, indicated that he would consider a similar course to bring the full Madonna House report into the public domain.

For legal reasons also, the Department of Health decided not to publish the Kelly Fitzgerald report but the Minister, Mr Noonan, agreed to make it available to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Family.

The members of the committee later published the report after using a parliamentary mechanism to give it the protection of Dail privilege.

This course of action, however, is specifically precluded in the Madonna House case.