GENEVA
Irish Times
Paddy Agnew
Wed, May 7, 2014
In what may have been a moment of confusion, the Vatican’s permanent representative at the UN in Geneva yesterday accused the Government of “mishandling” money paid by way of compensation to Magdalene laundries victims.
Appearing before the UN’s Committee Against Torture, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi was asked by US human rights activist Felice Gaer if any compensation had been paid to the former Magdalene nuns, Archbishop Tomasi replied:
“With regard to the Magdalene [victims], we have already answered this question at the Committee for the Rights of the Child [four months ago], but just for your information, you should know that the four religious orders of nuns involved have contributed $440 million to the [Irish] Government to take care of the victims of that situation.
“In part, the Government has mishandled that money and they came back to ask for more money, so some of the orders then said ‘we don’t want to pay any more money because it is not going to be used properly’. That is what I know at this point.”
Archbishop Tomasi may have confused contributions made by a number of religious congregations to the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme (industrial schools for children) with non-existent contributions to a Magdalene compensatory scheme.
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