Last Tuesday, the Taoiseach misled the Dáil. The subject was the alleged waste of over half a billion euro of taxpayers' money. This is the additional cost to the State of shouldering the vast bulk of the bill (now up to €1.3 billion) to compensate victims of institutional child abuse, writes Mary Raftery.
There has been so much argument about the notorious Church/State deal on redress, which capped the contribution by religious orders at €128 million (less than 10 per cent of the total), that sight has been lost of the major issue.
It is not, as the Taoiseach sought to argue this week, about whether some people feel that victims should not be compensated. There is unanimity, both within the Oireachtas and throughout the general population, that financial redress is entirely appropriate.
Nor is the issue about whether too much is being paid out to victims, or that people may be applying for compensation who are not entitled to it. (The average payout is, if anything, too low compared to equivalent High Court awards, and there has been no evidence of claimant fraud.) What this is about is the cost of an indemnity. How much is it worth to have the State bail you out if you are sued, covering your legal costs and all awards made against you? When you know, as the religious orders did, that you could be facing tens of thousands of claims, such an indemnity was devoutly to be desired. Getting it so cheaply was like manna from heaven.
The Government has spent years scrabbling about trying to defend what in reality is its (or rather the taxpayers') extraordinary generosity to 18 religious congregations who ran institutions in which children suffered unspeakable abuse.
Bertie Ahern was at it again on Tuesday. They couldn't afford to pay anything more than €128 million, he said.
However, there is no basis for this. The Comptroller and Auditor General has made clear in his reports that no one from the State ever even asked for information on the assets of the religious orders.
Mr Ahern also said that "it was not known how many people were in our institutions that were under State control". Again, not true. The State has always had detailed records of numbers in industrial schools and other institutions, as it paid a fee in respect of each such child. To estimate how many are alive today, it is reasonable to calculate the figures since 1930, as the C&AG has done. This reveals that we are concerned with about 30,000 individuals who grew up in institutional care, and may be eligible for compensation. In fact, less than half have applied - the total now stands at 14,541.
The Taoiseach added that the original estimate of cost by the Department of Education was €610 million. This also is untrue. The earliest estimate, communicated by the State to the religious orders, was in fact €254 million, which we now know was a wild miscalculation.
However, the final contribution by the orders to the redress scheme ended up at almost exactly 50 per cent of this original estimate, reflecting the State's view at the time that both it and the religious orders were jointly liable for the abuse suffered by children.
This joint liability line was repeated in the Dáil by the Taoiseach on Tuesday. "If it had been fought in court, the State would have been jointly liable," he said. (If this is indeed his view, then surely it follows that State and Church should equally share the cost of redress.) However, in 2003 a High Court ruling cast serious doubt over the joint liability argument.
In this case, the State was held to have zero liability for the abuse of a child at an institution, and the religious order concerned was judged to be 100 per cent responsible. The basis for this ruling was the manner in which the State conducted the business of industrial schools. It paid the bills, but it left the management of the institutions entirely to the religious orders. Consequently, according to Justice O'Higgins, the State was not liable in the case before him.
In the light of this judgment, which the State has now successfully used as a precedent to argue that is has no liability for child abuse in other, day-school cases, it is difficult to see how the Taoiseach can claim, as he did on Tuesday, that "the State's deeper pockets would have ended up paying the full bill. That is what would have happened legally." Or even his statement that "the State was responsible for these institutions".
The truth is that the Government has acted brazenly to protect the assets of the Catholic Church. In doing so, it has exposed the taxpayer to a massive bill for which it transpires the State may have no legal liability. Meanwhile, it continues vindictively to pursue victims of abuse at day-schools, like Louise O'Keeffe, for the enormous legal costs arising from their failed attempts to make the State take responsibility for what happened to them. It would be hard to find a more blatant double standard.