The senior civil servants who have raised concerns about the potentially enormous cost to the State of a redress scheme for victims of sexual abuse in schools have performed an important service. Our politicians and wider civil society need to think about these concerns very carefully.
The bottom line is whether today’s children, and those yet unborn, should be penalised for the sins of their grandparents, and even great grandparents – because that is what a redress scheme for past wrongs potentially costing tens of billions of euro will amount to.
At a time when the Government is struggling to find a way to provide for the needs of the current population, the idea of devising a redress scheme on a “far greater scale” than any other scheme in the history of the State, as the civil servants termed it, is something that needs to be thought through rigorously.
The group of top civil servants based across the Departments of the Taoiseach, Public Expenditure and Finance, Education, Children and Justice have had the experience of previous public inquiries and redress schemes costing far more than was envisaged when they were established.
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Successive governments have responded to pressure from the opposition and the media to get to the bottom of a variety of scandals and abuses by establishing judicial inquiries of various kinds, as well as redress schemes, without giving any great thought to their eventual cost.
That cost has been borne by the exchequer, which is too often regarded in this country as some kind of bottomless money pit, rather than the fund that provides for the everyday services that keep the country’s health, education and welfare services going.
Of course some of the redress schemes in the past have provided well-deserved compensation to the victims of State neglect or abuse, but a large proportion of the costs of inquiries has gone into the pockets of the lawyers, and they have lasted far longer than anybody ever anticipated when they were set up.
Then there is the question of whether the various judicial inquiries since the Beef Tribunal in the 1990s have actually achieved anything much for the people of the country, despite their cost. One clear achievement has been to dish out vast sums in legal fees in what was memorably described by Pat Rabbitte as “a barrister-fattening exercise”.
The commission of inquiry into the sale of a company called Siteserv to businessman Denis O’Brien, which involved a State agency, is a case in point. The controversy kicked off when Social Democrat TD Catherine Murphy claimed in the Dáil in 2015 that insider trading took place before the company was sold.
A judicial inquiry under Mr Justice Brian Cregan was established by the government in 2016, but Murphy then refused to give evidence before it. Immediately hamstrung by her decision to opt out, it reported seven years later, with the final cost estimated at somewhere in excess of €70 million. And what did the tribunal find? Simply that nothing untoward had taken place during the sale process.
The scandal of abuse in schools is a very different proposition, but the basic fact is that the inquiry already established, never mind the potential redress scheme, will cost a considerable amount in legal fees and will take years, possibly even decades, to come to a conclusion.
The commission of inquiry into abuse in schools under Mr Justice Michael MacGrath has been given five years to report but few people in the legal world believe it will have finished its task in that time. A time frame of 10 years is probably more realistic. The decision on whether to proceed with a redress scheme will be taken after the commission has started its work.
The question raised by the civil servants needs to be answered before that happens. Is the State liable for the abuse that took place in schools? Will the religious orders who were responsible for the abuse be held liable? Can the victims sue the orders directly? A legal mechanism must be found to force them to pay, rather than making it the responsibility of the taxpayer.
Analysis by the Department of Public Expenditure warned the Government against “the significant risks” of a “rushed” redress scheme, “including the assumption of risk by the State when liability should more appropriately be borne by third parties”. The report said that recent case law on the liability for the actions of school employees found that “the State does not have such liability”.
At the heart of the reservations held by the senior civil servants about an open-ended redress scheme is the impact it is likely to have on the budgets for present-day needs. The priority must be for the State to deploy all possible resources to ensure the present generation of children are properly looked after.
A range of services for children are underfunded, with the Departments of Health, Education and Children having to fight tooth and nail for scarce resources. Are they to suffer even more pressure on their basic services to fund payment for the sins of the past?
