Child Abuse
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IT HAS become increasingly difficult to sustain any kind of argument in favour of the "secret deal" negotiated by Michael Woods with the Catholic Church in the summer of 2002. Details of the deal were first published in the Irish Independent the following January. The key to the deal - which has the State taking a meagre €127m in exchange for immunity for the church - was again criticised by Pat Rabbitte in the Dail on Tuesday, when he blamed the Taoiseach for setting such a low bar on church immunity from the State.
I argued in 2003 that the deal, far from being in the interests of the victims of abuse in church-run institutions, was part of a set of State responses that circumscribed the rights to justice of those victims.
Instead, it sought to provide the State with a new freedom to act outside natural justice and constitutional protections, while immunising the church from pursuit in the courts. That argument has been sustained ever since.
The deal is now seen for what it was: one which protected the church's money and exonerated church institutions. These had plundered and damaged the lives of tens of thousands of people. And since this was the case, then a sceptical and critical eye had to be cast over the whole process.
The reverse happened. Together, Church and State - the two most powerful organisations in Ireland - came together in a close and self-serving way that has many faults in it, the payment by the institutions of the pitiful €127m being merely one of them.
Bertie Ahern made one of his many nonsense statements when he said of Pat Rabbitte: "I accept Deputy Rabbitte's view, but he should accept mine."
This was an impasse that was also an impossibility. The Taoiseach needed to look again at the secret deal, if only because everything about it was wrong, and has been proved wrong.
Part of the Taoiseach's argument was that "no one could have predicted" the number of applications. This also, unfortunately, is not true. Indeed, from Bertie Ahern's 1997 apology on, everything done by the State was primarily dependent on an anticipation that an unknown but substantial number of victims of Church abuse would take action in the Irish courts.
The records were also there, for actuarial analysis, of all the inmates of all the institutions.
The deal was made because people had recognised that these court claims were waiting to descend on the State, and it was necessary to bring in the elaborate mechanisms designed to hear what the abused had to say and to compensate them for the damage done to them, using a method that controlled them and left no loopholes for alternative court action.
This could not be done without the connivance of the religious institutions, and that connivance could not be copperfastened without an indemnity agreement.
In his defence of his own inaction over the deal, against Rabbitte's quite proper demands, the Taoiseach said: "The Irish church does not have those resources." Yet how does he know? There has never been an audit of church wealth. The institutions, as registered charitable institutions, were above investigation. The Taoiseach made it sound compassionate and gentle. In other words, they were not to be robbed.
Instead, there was to be no investigation, into the past or in the present, of the very substantial sums that flowed into church coffers from the Irish State intended for child welfare.
Since it was not so used, and to all intents and purposes, represents part of the wealth of the church in Ireland, it must have been very badly invested, if the church today is as poor as Bertie would have us believe.
What is not in dispute is the fact that, over the period from the Thirties to the Seventies, money was paid over for the health and education of institutionalised children, and was not used to that end.
During that long and sorry period, abused people were half-starved and denied education, health care or training. They were subjected to savage beatings and sexual assaults.
And all that time, the State paid per capita grants for their proper education and for their Christian care. Much of that money was, at the very least, controlled from Rome and may have been invested there as well.
It constituted the growing wealth of the orders established in Ireland to look after the destitute young girls and boys, at the State's expense, a job they so lamentably failed to do.
So what is going on now?
Perhaps central to all of this is the work of the Ryan Commission on Child Sex Abuse.
It is notable that Pope Benedict, who has found his voice on the appalling abuse in the Ferns diocese a year after the Ferns Report, has yet to find his voice on the decades of abuse in industrial schools over a period of 50 years.
He will do so when the Ryan Commission comes to its conclusions. Those conclusions bear in particular on the Christian Brothers, indicted more often and more seriously than most other orders caring for Irish children.
The Ryan Commission is mainly a closed operation. It does hold public sessions, but they are muted in tone and neither aggressive nor penetrative in interrogation.
To judge from its workings so far, it seems likely that its final conclusions will reflect the continued failure, throughout many public examinations, to confront the vague generalisations that have come from people speaking on behalf of the institutions.
Its overall target will be reconciliation. How can it do other than reflect what has been said before it, in public and private sessions?
The circumstances of life in the institutions - which we know from former inmates to have been terrible - have been revealed, on behalf of the institutions themselves, as more or less in line with the privations of the nation as a whole.
At one public hearing, a senior Christian Brother quite extraordinarily, and without intervention by Sean Ryan, referred to the children at Artane as "students on the campus".
Yet Artane refused to advance the education of the "prisoner students" beyond primary level, and many didn't even get there - that was a policy matter.
Large numbers left the "campus" highly damaged and without the means to direct their lives. That was their gift from Ireland's premier teaching order.
To get the complete story of the "students on the campus", Pope Benedict may need to organise his own inquiry - a sort of Ferns in reverse.
In so doing, he may establish the true nature of the local Church-State relationship, post 1922 in this country. It will be another opportunity for His Holiness to engage in public anguish and distress, in which I, for one, will not join.