THE Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Family will try to get the two censored sections of the Madonna House inquiry into the public domain.
The report was published yesterday minus two chapters, which were withheld by the Government after advice from the Attorney General, Mr Dermot Gleeson, "because of the need to protect the identities of certain parties and to avoid interference with ongoing investigations and legal proceedings."
These proceedings include civil actions for damages by former residents of the home against the Sisters of Charity, who ran the home, and the Eastern Health Board which financed it and placed children in it.
Mr Alan Shatter Fine Gael backbencher and member of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Family said last night that he will consider pursuing the publication of the omitted chapters.
Mr Shatter managed to circumvent the Government's original prohibition on publishing the Kelly Fitzgerald report by having the committee adopt the Western Health Board's report as its own preliminary report. It was then laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas. The report was then covered by Dail privilege and its contents were immune from litigation.
Yesterday, both Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats said it would serve the public interest much better had the Madonna House report been published in full. The Fianna Fail spokeswoman on health, Mrs Maire Geoghegan Quinn, said the Minister of State, Mr Austin Currie, was "yet again leaving it up to an Oireachtas Committee to ensure full disclosure in relation to child abuse investigations".
"Other important reports on child abuse investigations are still unpublished and these should be immediately published now by the Minister of State. The full findings of these investigations are in the public interest and should be disclosed", she added.
The Progressive Democrats' spokeswoman on justice, Ms Liz O'Donnell, said to publish "a filleted version" of the Madonna House report could hardly be described as an exercise in public accountability. "All that remained of the report was a worthy analysis of the general literature on child abuse", she said.
It was "clearly unacceptable" that we continue to run into the difficulty of publishing reports into maladministration because of the threat of litigation by persons mentioned in the report or because the State itself is the defendant, she said.
The report reveals that 15 children have made specific assault allegations against maintenance man Frank Griffin to gardai and the Eastern Health Board. Five others have described behaviour by Griffin "which constituted alleged abuse". The children included boys and girls and some were as young as seven.
Griffin was jailed for three years in 1994 for sexual offences against five teenage girls at the home.
The Sisters issued a statement expressing "deep regret that even one child could be abused while in our care. It is important, however, not to lose sight of the many hundreds of children in our care, who experienced only love, care and safety from very committed staff".
In a statement, the Eastern Health Board said it "deeply regrets that some children were abused while living in Madonna House children who were in the care of the board and living in a home funded by the board."