Child Abuse
Newspaper Articlessitemap privacy © 2003
Today’s tracking poll results bring unwelcome news for the Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, but he continues to do an important public service by refusing to let the public or the government forget the consequences of the appalling, unfair, behind-closed-doors deal that Bertie Ahern’s government did with the religious orders.
Last week in the Dail Rabbitte again focused public and political attention on the consequences of this deal, as he has done repeatedly since he became leader of his party.
He used the recent estimates of the Comptroller and Auditor General of the final cost of the Residential Institutions Redress Board - heading for an astonishing €1.2 billion - to pose a set of questions for the Taoiseach, to which, predictably, he received no satisfactory answers.
Like Rabbitte, this newspaper has been posing those questions since this squalid arrangement with the religious orders was entered into in secret in 2002, and ratified by Ahern’s 1997-2002 government at its very last meeting, on its very last day of existence.
Unlike Rabbitte, this newspaper does not believe that every malfeasance of the government is a thundering disgrace, that every infraction by a minister is a resigning matter and that every parliamentary contretemps is a crisis.
But this is one occasion when we outdo Rabbitte in outrage. The deal with the religious orders was the worst thing that either of the governments of Ahern has done.
It was a betrayal of the public good at the behest of an organisation that secured its own interests with a cynicism that is simply breathtaking.
It is surely ironic that another branch of that organisation - Cori, the religious orders umbrella body - seeks regularly to lecture the rest of us on matters of morality and of economic fairness.
The religious played hardball; the guardians of the public purse played dead. The government has in the past purported to have believed that either there was no reliable estimate of what the scheme would cost, or that what estimates existed were low.
As they knew (the religious certainly did) court decisions were there to offer guidance on what the unfortunate victims of clerical terror would be due at redress stage; and the numbers of residents at the institutions in question was known to the religious orders.
Last week the Taoiseach offered a new justification for taking on the billion euro bill on behalf of the taxpayers: the religious orders couldn’t afford it.
Well, now we know. Aside altogether from the constitutional prohibition on endowing any religion, the Taoiseach decided that the Church couldn’t afford to pay its bills, so the taxpayer would pay instead.
At every stage of scrutiny, both of the deal itself and of the details of the fig-leaf contribution that the orders have made to the cost of the scheme, the government has dissembled and evaded.
Well it might. The orders, on the other hand, must be laughing all the way to the land bank.