18 orders to fund €128m contribution

Eighteen the 129 religious orders affiliated to the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI) will between them fund the group's €128 million contribution to the Government's Redress Scheme for victims of childhood abuse.

They are made up of orders which ran the various industrial schools, orphanages, and other institutions concerned and which accommodated an estimated 30,000 children over the decades they were in use.

It is believed that about a tenth of these will avail of the redress scheme. That is the number which have made submissions to the Laffoy commission.

Compensation paid out by religious in Canada (Christian Brothers) is estimated at $6 million, and at about $5 million in Australia, where the Christian Brothers were involved also.

Far and away the greater compensation amounts by the Catholic Church abroad to date have been paid by dioceses rather than by religious orders. In the US alone over the past 15 years, Catholic dioceses have paid an estimated $800 million to victims abused by about 1,000 priests.

The Redress Scheme being proposed here, which will not involve contributions from dioceses, will be headed by a senior legal figure. It will accept claims from victims for three years from the date of the current Bill becoming law, which is expected to happen before Easter. But it is believed it will serve for about four years to address all claims. There will be no statute of limitations where claimants are concerned.

The scheme will apply only to people who were in the institutions as children, though the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, has undertaken to consider cases of children abused while attending day schools and of women who worked in Magdalen launderies.

A spokesman for the Department of Education said last night that the proposed Redress Scheme was not excluding anybody. "It is for a particular group of people," he said.

But he felt that because of the "extraordinarily low" validation threshold involved under the current scheme, it would be difficult to extend it to children who had been living in their own homes while attending day school.

The validation process was so low because everyone agreed the conditions were bad in the institutions concerned, he said. Validation for those abused as children at day schools would have to be more rigorous, he said.