Call for €15m fund for abused, by Justine Mccarthy, Sunday Times (July 29, 2018)

Finian McGrath, the cabinet’s super-junior minister, has written to the minister for finance asking him to allocate €15m in the October budget to people who were sexually abused in day schools but are disqualified from the state’s redress scheme.

The letter to Paschal Donohoe came after the Independent Alliance minister criticised the government’s opposition to a Fianna Fail motion in the Dail at a July 10 cabinet meeting. It proposed extending eligibility for the scheme to applicants whose attackers had been convicted in the courts. The motion was passed, with 84 votes in favour and 44 against.

McGrath said in his letter that victims who had been deemed ineligible for the ex-gratia payments scheme, administered by the State Claims Agency, were owed a debt by the state for helping to remove child abusers from schools by assisting with their prosecutions.

At present, the scheme limits redress to those who can prove that their school received a complaint before they were abused, even if the abuser has been found guilty in the courts. The Dail motion also proposed abolishing this condition.

So far, only six individuals have received compensation under the scheme, which makes maximum individual payments of €84,000.

McGrath, the minister for disability issues, reportedly told education minister Richard Bruton, after the Fianna Fail motion was passed, that “the government was treating survivors worse than the church”.

In his letter to Donohoe, he said the cabinet should reconsider its position from a compassionate perspective.

Last November, Bruton appointed Iarfhlaith O’Neill, a retired High Court judge, to assess rejected claims. In March, O’Neill asked Bruton for a submission on whether the prior complaint requirement was consistent with a 2014 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which upheld the case of Louise O’Keeffe, who was abused by her school principal Leo Hickey in the 1970s. The judgment led to the establishment of the payments scheme.

O’Neill is expected to deliver his determination on the issue to Bruton in September.

Separately, the Oireachtas communications committee is due to discuss a complaint about RTE’s coverage of the Dail motion when committee members meet representatives of Facebook in Leinster House on Wednesday.

Mark Vincent Healy, an anti-child abuse campaigner, has also made a complaint to RTE, accusing the national broadcaster of ignoring the government’s defeat on the Fianna Fail motion, except for “two hard-to-find articles” on its website.

“If 20 female survivors had turned up at the Dail on July 4 last, who had fought for justice for decades, I have no doubt that RTE would have been all over it or there would have been hell to pay,” Healy said.