It now appears that money, rather than delay, was the main concern of theGovernment in ordering a second review of the work of the Laffoy commission, writes Carol Coulter, Legal Affairs Correspondent
Had a staffed-up Laffoy commission on child abuse been allowed to continue its work according to its own revised schedule, it could have finished it a full year before it will now do under the Government's review, it has emerged. And done so without "sampling" testimonies.
A document called "Framework of Procedures", outlining the commission's own revised plans, was posted on the commission's website on November 8th, 2002, following consultations with victims' groups and the respondents, including the Department of Education as a defendant.
At that stage, the commission considered that, if it continued to work as it had been doing, the work of the Investigation Committee could take up to 11 years.
So it decided to divide into four divisions to hear allegations.
This was intended to cut the time by four, so the commission expected to complete the hearings within three years by July 2005.
This was the basis for the request for about 40 additional staff, of whom 10 would have been barristers.
The rest would have been administrative and support staff.
The plan also required the appointment of an additional commissioner and four deciding officers to hear the evidence.
Legislation to permit this was already in place as the question of working in a number of divisions had already been considered a year earlier, and the legislation to permit it put into the Redress Bill.
The allegations were being grouped into modules based on individual institutions, each of which would be assigned to a division. In some instances this was divided again according to, for example, the manager in place at the time of a group of allegations.
There would also be modules for national schools, secondary schools, hospitals and foster care.
So it appeared that everything was in place to start the four divisional hearings, and hearings involving some of the smaller institutions were ready to go at the beginning of the year.
The commission planned to hear evidence of "context" first.
Much of the defence to allegations of abuse, especially that relating to physical and emotional abuse and neglect, concerned the context of the time, the resources available to the institutions in question, and the contemporary norms of child welfare.
Rather than hear evidence from social historians in each and every case, the commission aimed to "set the scene" for each module by establishing what such norms were, against which the allegations could be measured.
About half the complaints of abuse - and the great majority of the complaints from women - concern physical and emotional abuse and neglect rather than sexual abuse.
The commission was also going to hear expert evidence relating to memory, dealing with issues like the effect of lapse of time on memory, the effects of trauma on it, and controversial issues like repressed memory and recovered memory.
The commission had decided to employ a legal costs accountant to decide on costs based on the lawyers' bills. If the costs awarded were not acceptable, they would then have gone to the Taxing Master of the High Court, who adjudicates on High Court costs.
This followed the deal done with lawyers for the victims at the beginning of the work of the commission.
The Government calculated that, on this basis, the costs for all the parties would have run to €200 million.
Following the commission's request for more resources in order to carry out its work in the four divisions, the Government decided to review the work of the commission. It did so with the co-operation of the commission, and between them they came up with a number of procedural proposals to speed up the work and make it more efficient.
These proposals were published by the Government on Wednesday in the first paragraph of its plan, and were in the Heads of Bill brought to Cabinet last April.
Had they been implemented, along with the four parallel hearings, it is likely that all the hearings would have been concluded, if not by July 2005, then by the end of that year.
It would then probably have taken about a year for the commission to write up its report, concluding it by the end of 2006.
According to the Government's own proposals published earlier this week, legislation with a new remit for the commission will not be drafted until the middle of next year.
It will then have to go through the Oireachtas, and the commission is unlikely to be hearing cases, whether sampled or not, until the end of the year.
Hearings will take at least two years, and the final report will take another year, so its publication is now at least four years away. Closure for victims is thus a year further away than it would have been.
However, the new proposals do mean that the Government will not have to pay an estimated legal bill of about €70 million a year over the next three years. It has made it clear that its new proposals will drastically reduce lawyers' fees.