Bruce Arnold
The Labour Party has made the first positive and considered move, in the interests of the abused from the industrial schools. This is a month after the publication of the Ryan Report, but in the light of what the party is offering, there is no harm done in the waiting.
The Party tabled a Bill in the Dail on Thursday that seeks to amend the law on the vexed issue of criminality arising from the committal of young children to industrial schools through the district courts. The exoneration is as comprehensive as it could be.
The Bill also seeks to amend the Redress Act in respect of victims of abuse who failed to make claims in time or were excluded because the institutions to which they were committed were not listed in the schedule of institutions covered by the Act. This is another key issue for a number of men and women who have been blocked by it during the past ten years.
A third matter addressed by the Bill is also one of serious and deep concern to many of those who went through the difficult and arduous redress appeal system under the Redress Act. This is the imposition of secrecy on all who accepted money from the Board with very severe penalties for default. These ranged from €3,500 fine or six months in prison up to €25,000 or two years in prison, or both. No other defaulters, among the religious orders, for concealment, dishonesty over documents, or for perjury, had such criminal fines outlined in the legislation.
The fourth important issue covered in the Bill is the protection of documents, both those collected and filed over ten years by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the personal documents submitted to the Redress Board. These are a State heritage and the Bill recognises this.
The Bill also recognises the need to free all the documents connected with the Indemnity Deal from restrictions which have operated up to now, precluding them from the remit of the Freedom of Information legislation. There is a desirable addition to this: the inclusion of all the documents pertaining to the Cabinet decision in 1999 to embark on this inquiry and redress road.
Wisely, Joan Burton and the two men promoting the Bill, Pat Rabbitte and Ruairi Quinn, both of whom have a long-standing involvement in the issue of the abused, concede that the Bill might sensibly be taken over by the government. This would resolve its financial provisions.
It came as some surprise how little attention this Labour Party initiative attracted. RTE failed to report it at all on the main evening news bulletin and sent no team to cover it.
After a month of the media wallowing in the more sensational aspects of the Ryan Report, this virtual ignoring of a positive and sensible move to alleviate real distress among the abused is regrettable.
It would be logical to expect that this move by the Labour Party came out of the recommendations of the Ryan Report. No such logic prevails, however. Despite the enthusiastic agreement of all the politicians in the Dail to endorse and support those recommendations, which was done unanimously, they are seriously defective and do not address any of the issues now covered by Labour’s proposed Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009.
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