Mr. Ned Costello:

I shall answer the questions thematically because there are many common threads in the themes.

I will first deal with question about the failure of State. There is no question that State failed all of those who were incarcerated in residential institutions. That has been made abundantly clear in the Ryan report, which does make for harrowing reading. The Taoiseach did apologise, on behalf of the State, to all survivors of institutions. That was clearly significant. There can be no question that the State failed and that has been fully acknowledged. It was partly on foot of that that the Residential Institutions Redress Board was established and the payments of approximately €1.2 billion of redress payments made to survivors; approximately 15,000 survivors received a payment from that board. The Caranua funding is in addition to the redress payments that were made.

I mentioned in my opening statement that the fund is finite and statutorily limited. That is significant because a significant amount of the tensions that arise derive from the fact that the fund is limited. I will talk about some of the issues that have been raised because a lot of them centre around the €15,000 limit. If one were to consider the population of survivors, and if this matter had been approached in a different way and a flat payment had been given to every survivor who already got an award from the redress board, that would have involved a payment of approximately €7,000 per survivor. It was not done that way. The initial approach was to have an entirely openended fund that was entirely needs based. There is an inevitable tension between that kind of an approach, a limited fund and a population of survivors who have received their redress payments already but might need further assistance from the fund. Again, I must stress that these decisions are statutorily independent by Caranua. That did result in, as one would understand, concerns about proportionality. That is the reasoning that underpins the €15,000 limit. The organisation would have been conscious of the fact that there were cohorts of survivors who had not been reached to date, in the context of the balance of the fund remaining and the need to take as equitable an approach as possible. It is clear that there are different views on that aspect.

I might touch on the issue of legal cases that was raised. Yes, the Department is aware that there is a legal challenge. It is complicated and I would possibly confuse things with the detail. Essentially, the legal challenge relates to the €15,000 limit and the application of the €15,000 limit. We have to see where the legal challenge goes.