Misrepresentation by Government

The Government continues to misrepresent the extraordinary indemnity deal done with the religious orders on residential child abuse.

In the Dáil on 15 December, Mary Hanafin, Minister for Education and Science, said in response to a writtenquestion "the congregations agreed to make a contribution of €128 million towards the redress scheme" and she broke this down as follows: a cash contribution of €41.14 million; provision of counseling services for €10 million and property transfers of €76,86 million.

This is a serious falsification of the reality.

The congregations, whose members abused hundreds if not thousands of children in residential institutions around the country, did not transfer property to the value of €76.86 million as a "contribution" to the redress scheme. As Colin Murphy reported in Village on 11 November, property already handed over to the State by these congregations to the value of €31m was thrown into the mix to make the deal look more reasonable. In fact all the religious orders "contributed" to the deal was €96m, not €128m.

And the property transfer of €44.86 million is very dubious. This is because such property, in the main, was held in trust by the congregations. Trusts are legal devices to enable people to contribute to charities that have a specific purpose, such as the advancement of religion, or the provision of health care to the needy or education for those who require it, or whatever. Those who contribute to the Trust do so in the assurance that their contributions will be used for the purpose of the trust or at least purposes akin to the original purposes. Not for other purposes that have nothing to do with the original purposes.

Nobody who contributed to any of the trusts in question ever expected their monies would be used to pay off victims of child abusers. So how could the properties owned by these trusts be transferred legally to purposes that had nothing to do with the original purposes?

Everyone involved wants to avoid this tricky issue.

So the State now has had property to the value of €44.86m transferred to it, knowing that its title to this property is at best suspect. But that, apparently, is ok!

When the deal was being negotiated initially the position of the State was that the congregations should contribute half of the estimated cost of the redress scheme. When the deal came to be signed the State knew that the estimated cost of the redress scheme was far in excess of double the heralded €128m and yet they went ahead. Of course the cost of the deal has far exceeded those estimates, it will now work out at around €1 billion. And the congregations will who should have contributed €500m will get away with a monetary contribution of around €50m (they have paid over some additional cash in lieu of property), plus a very dubious €10m by way of counseling and an even more dubious €44m in property.

Shameful.

^Continuing inaction on child abuse

There is much self-congratulation on the part of the state over the Stay-Safe programme in primary schools. This aims to reduce the vulnerability of children to abuse, through the in-service training of teachers, parent education and personal safety education for children. The programme seeks to give children the skills to enable them to recognise and resist abuse and teaches them they always should tell an adult about any situation they find unsafe, threatening or abusive. The Department of Education and Science claims that 80 to 85 per cent of primary schools provide this instruction to children and that almost all primary teachers have participated in the requisite training. Sound impressive?

Well not really. In the first instance the initial training given to teachers is a one day in-service course. Secondly, the Ferns Report disclosed that the last evaluation of the Stay Safe programme was ten years ago.

So how do we know how many primary schools are now running this programme? How do we know how effective the programme is? How do we know whether the teachers operating the programme are doing so effectively?

How is it that the scale of child abuse does not propel the issue to the top of the political agenda?

As we reported here some weeks ago, more than 127,000 people have been sexually abused in childhood. This comes from a study in part funded, incidentally by Atlantic Philanthropies and also by the Department of Health and Children and the Department of Justice Equality and Law Reform: "Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland" (SAVI).

Since then only one of the eight urgent recommendations of the report has been implemented by the Government. And although impressive guidelines on the handling of allegations of child sexual abuse have been introduced across state and voluntary agencies, there has been little follow-through on the auditing of the extent and effectiveness of their implementation. Most significantly, the urgent recommendation that a "comprehensive public awareness campaign on sexual violence" has not happened.

Five thousand years ago they built Newgrange

Nine thousand years ago people starting arriving in Ireland for the first time, probably coming over from Scotland to settle in Antrim. Some time later some thousand people probably walked across the land bridge between Ireland and Wales. About six and a half thousand years ago, cattle arrived here, along with goats and sheep and that started agriculture which, the IFA tells us, is now about to expire became of the World Trade talks in Hong Kong.

Then around five thousand two hundred years ago – 3200BC – the Irish started to bury their dead, or at least the upper-class dead, in burial moulds. The most famous of these burial grounds is Newgrange, which was built probably around 600 years before the Egyptian pyramids were built and a thousand years before the English built Stonehenge.

Newgrange is a huge passage tomb, intricately decorated, and built with precision so that the winter solstice sun shines directly along the full length of the tomb lighting an underground chamber. It is a particular attraction at this time of the year for obvious reasons.

By the way the Celts weren't around when Newgrange was built. The first wave of Celts did no get here until 700BC. That is only 2,700 years ago, whereas there were humans in Ireland 6,300 years before the Celts got here. Blow ins.

What is the likelihood that in the next ten years a new motorway will be routed over or through Newgrange?

No accountability for schools or teachers

Secondary teachers and the Department of Education and Science are joined in opposition to disclosing how schools perform in the Leaving Certificate examination. Mary Hanafin says "I am strongly opposed to the publication of crude league tables based solely on examination or test results. Such tables provide an unbalanced and grossly limited indication of a school's performance".

Maybe.

But students are assessed on the basis of these "unbalanced and grossly limited indications" of their performance. The Leaving Certificate determines whether they will get into their preferred course in a third level institution. It hugely influences their life chances and careers. So if it is good enough to determine the life course of students, why is it not good enough as a means of assessing how secondary schools perform?

Mary Hanafin says she favours the publication of "whole school evaluations", which, apparently will evaluate everything about schools except the most crucial aspect, as far as students are concerned, how good schools are in getting good Leaving Certificate decent results for their students.

Of course schools that are well resourced are likely to fare better. Of course schools whose catchment area is from social-disadvantaged communities are likely to do worse. But shouldn't we now about that? Wouldn't the disclosure of such information pressurise government into compensating schools that are under-resourced and in disadvantaged areas?

Facts are friendly. The suppression of such information enables teachers, schools and the Department of Education and Science to escape accountability.