Former victims of abuse have criticised a compensation scheme that will see religious orders contribute €128 million.
The compensation scheme for victims of abuse in religious institutions will finally cost between €200 million and €500 million, the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, said last night.
The scheme was agreed after over a year of talks between the Government and religious orders held responsible for decades of sexual and physical abuse of children.
Religious orders will pay €38 million in cash and transfer property to the State worth €80 million. Some €10 million will be put towards counselling services for an estimated 3,500 victims.
Ms Christine Buckley of help group Aislinn called the money being offered a pittance and said it should be increased to three-fifths of the likely total fund from its current one-fifth. "We have to ask: Why are the religious being let off with €128 million?", Ms Buckley said on RTÉ radio.
She said the thousands of children, most of them orphans, who had passed through industrial schools had generated huge wealth for the Church working on farms and doing laundry and sewing jobs.
"There was so much money saved through this corrupt regime because we were the slave labourers. There was so much money being accumulated . . . and children were being worked like slaves", she said.
Sister Elizabeth Maxwell, spokeswoman for the Conference of the Religious in Ireland (CORI), representing 18 orders, said the church was anxious for reconciliation. "We accept that some children in residential institutions managed by our members suffered deprivation, physical and sexual abuse", she said in a statement.
"We regret that. We apologise for it." The money being paid by the Church was, she said, a concrete expression of genuine desire to foster healing and reconciliation in the lives of former residents.