Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Finally, the Government must pursue the religious congregations for a proportionate response to their role in the abuse of children in the institutions they ran. The contrition expressed by the 18 congregations concerned is too little, too late. Furthermore, their self-preserving actions have undermined their apologetic words at every turn. Right up to the publication of the Ryan report, some senior clerics in the orders were denying in letters to the commission the extent of the abuse. When it came to negotiating a deal with Deputy Bertie Ahern's Government in 2002, they knew what had occurred in the institutions but they still fought to minimise their contribution to a mere £100 million. We now know this represented less than one tenth of the ultimate cost of redress for the victims. It is simply not credible that all of the orders which negotiated this deal were unaware of the scale of abuse that had happened under their watch.

Let the contrition of the orders involved be proven by their actions in the face of the overwhelming evidence set out in the Ryan report. They must be liable for half the financial burden of redress for the victims. A new fund dedicated to the ongoing needs of survivors of institutional abuse should be administered and provided entirely separately from the religious orders which finance it. I do not believe that we can ever make full restitution to the survivors and their families. No sum of money can ever adequately compensate them for what was done. We cannot give them back their stolen childhoods but we can honour their bravery and their legacy by ensuring that we will never again be silent about the needs of vulnerable children and we will never again abandon them.

The present generation needs to change the mindset that permitted this scandal to happen. That mindset accepted poverty, disadvantage, poor health, inadequate housing and the warehousing of surplus children as part of what we were. It was prepared to tolerate glaring, persistent and institutionalised inequality because we were taught to believe there was no alternative. We were told for generations that we were a poor country with little or no natural resources and which had been oppressed and victimised throughout its history. The idea that we could mount a comprehensive assault on poverty and disadvantage or provide State funded welfare for our children was a utopian ambition which had no place in the daily reality of Irish public life. The best the poor, the marginalised and people with disabilities could hope for was good will, good works and the voluntary dedication of a few, backed up by the coppers we put into the collection tins. It was a world where symptoms might be relieved while their causes went untreated. Crying needs were met, if at all, as a matter of grace and favour rather than as of right. There was sporadic and inadequate benevolence rather than a coherent and systematic effort to face up to the demands of basic justice.

It was never right to see ourselves that way but there is no justification for it now. Nor is there justification for a Government that continues to foster a culture of servility and patronage. That is the light in which we ought to review our country's claim to be a true republic with true republican notions of shared citizenship and the shared rights of all our citizens.

One could argue that in a perverse way our State was always equal in its approach to our children. Essentially, the State left it to others – parents, guardians and the religious – to get on with the task of caring for them. In other words, it was equal in its treatment of children by being equally oblivious to the needs of any child who could not be supported by his or her own parents. The story set out in the Ryan report has nothing to do with the well off. It has nothing to do with the future of children whose parents had a place in society. It has everything to do with how we treat people on the margins.

There are two basic reasons why we ended up with such a flawed system of caring for those on the margins. First, we believed in those days that the State simply could not afford to engage with ambition in improving the welfare of its citizens who were most in need. Second, we were told that the State did not have the moral or philosophical claim to engage in such a project because that was the job of the church.

We are less likely now to accept the claims of the Catholic church to an exclusive right to make provision in areas of health, education and welfare, just as the church is far less likely to make these claims. However, we have not yet fully come to terms with the demands we impose when we insist that the State itself must make provision for people in need. It is easy enough to claim we have improved the situation by closing down the industrial schools and reformatories but what are we doing today to meet the needs of children at risk? Last May, one week after the Ryan report was published, the HSE issued its review of the adequacy of children and family services for 2007. That body has a statutory responsibility to promote the welfare of children who are not receiving adequate care and protection. The review shows that social workers in the Cork North Lee office, for example, received 1,000 reports about children at risk. Of those 1,000 children, just 11 had received an initial assessment by a social worker.

In total, the HSE received 23,268 reports relating to child abuse, neglect or child welfare concerns in 2007 yet there was an initial assessment undertaken in respect of only 15,074 of them. Last year 21,000 reports of children at risk were made to health authorities but one third of these were not allocated to social workers. What is more, even when the HSE takes children into care, it cannot allocate a social worker to safeguard every one of them. While there are 5,529 children in care, just 4,623, or 84%, have been allocated social workers. The chief executive of the HSE, Professor Brendan Drumm, has stated that he has not been provided with the funding for sufficient social workers.

Ten days before the Ryan report came out, we received the report into the tragic deaths of the Dunne family in Monageer, County Wexford, or more accurately, we saw a heavily censored version. Huge sections of it were blacked out including, most extraordinary or all, some of the recommendations. How are we, as the national Parliament, expected to monitor implementation of the recommendations of the report when we do not even know what they are?

The final point I want to make concerns this country's culture of obedience. Whether it is obedience in a previous generation to the demands of the church or in the present day to the demands of the markets, we are always being told there are rules we must not question and that there are facts we must accept as given. One of these facts is that the vast bulk of primary and secondary education in this country is provided on a denominational basis. The State provides the greater part of the capital and current cost of recognised schools established by private bodies by paying the teachers' salaries, prescribing a curriculum and providing free transport to schools where necessary but the schools remain in private hands and are privately controlled. The same is true of many of the most significant assets that the State relies upon to deliver our public health services. There has been a progressive recognition on the part of the Catholic hierarchy of a new equilibrium between State and church in delivering public services. For example, the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference has suggested there is scope for a change of school patron in areas where there is no longer sufficient demand for a Catholic education.

However, the most important lesson the Ryan report teaches us is accountability and this must be at the heart of future reforms. No institution is above the law. Every institution must be examined, inspected and held to account for what it does. Where public money is involved, accountability must be delivered to public representatives on behalf of the people and, because we are now paying for them, we the people are entitled to reform our health, education and welfare systems to meet our current needs rather than the demands of those who founded them many years ago. We should begin by transferring the physical infrastructure of our publicly funded schools and hospitals into the ownership of the State. As suggested by my colleague Deputy Ruairí Quinn, this process should begin with the transfer to State ownership of the primary school network. Of the 3,200 primary schools in this State, fewer than 100 of them are actually owned by the State, with the remainder in the ownership of religious denominations, including many which are owned by the religious orders indicted in the Ryan report.

We all recognise that children are entitled to special care and assistance. Mr Justice Ryan has provided graphic proof of how badly this country let down its children. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for what he has done. In 1900, in a pamphlet called The Coming Generation, James Connolly challenged the Labour Party to achieve a country where "every child in our Irish soil will by the mere fact of its existence be an heir to, and partner in, all the country produces; will have the same right to an assured existence as the citizen has today to his citizenship". More than 100 years later, the 21st century must become the century that the Irish people hold true to and deliver on our obligations to all our children.

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