Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

As Deputy Higgins stated, I will speak on what Parliament needs to do. A number of issues need to be addressed and I hope the Government will agree to address them. The Residential Institutions Redress Act must be amended as soon as possible to remove the confidentiality and gagging clauses which hang over those who went before the board. While they may have received some compensation, a penal regime of secrecy applies with regard to everything that occurred before the redress board. I and many other Deputies have met and spoken to many people who went before the board who were traumatised - to the point of being almost suicidal - by the harshness of the adversarial system they experienced, which included cross-questioning by legal teams appointed by the State and, more specifically, the religious orders.

The gagging clauses must be removed. Some of those who appeared before the redress board wish to write plays and poems about their experience, while others would like to carry out academic research into their experience. They are effectively gagged by the penalties for breaking the harsh confidentiality clause, which are a fine of €2,000 or six months in jail on summary conviction in the District Court or €25,000 or two years in jail on indictment. These severe penalties must be removed. I am not a lawyer but gangs of lawyers inside and outside the House who work in the service of the State must find a way to lift the gag as soon as possible. Achieving this will help set free the adults who, as children, were placed in residential institutions. Many are still children in some respects because their experiences and suffering prevented part of them from being able to grow up. Removing the gagging clause is one aspect of providing recompense.

A second issue arises regarding the committal procedures people underwent. While I welcome the formal statement by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform that it is his belief that the committal orders and procedures and records in the District Courts do not amount to convictions, this is not the case in the minds of many people. Addressing this issue is not only necessary for the people in question but also for their children, grandchildren, wives and partners. The State must find a way to raise the bar by formally recognising that those committed to residential institutions were not criminals and do not carry any taint arising from committal proceedings. As the Minister indicated, this may tax the ingenuity of lawyers. The legal profession can, however, produce a solution and the Minister can go further than the statement he made today. The British, for example, spent 70 years or more finding a formula to expunge the stain that applied to the young soldiers who were shot at dawn because they were deemed to be cowards during the First World War. We must find the imagination to do the same for those who believe they carry some taint or stain because of the committal procedures.

It has been suggested that the documentation acquired by the Ryan commission may be destroyed. The destruction of vital and irreplaceable records would deny information to future scholars, journalists, researchers and the victims and their families, including their children and grandchildren. We must also bear in mind those who victims who made lives for themselves abroad, whether in England, the United States or elsewhere, and whose families may wish to research their history. It would send the wrong message to victims of abuse that the Ryan commission report constitutes the end of the road and the State has done enough and wishes to draw a line in the sand and move on. Such a decision would do immense damage to Ireland's international reputation. How would we justify such an apparent cover-up at the end of a prolonged and tortuous investigation? Alternatives are available. The Ryan commission reports must be deposited within our archive structures, having due regard to those who wish to remain anonymous and those who wish to use the records available to the commission. The House must devise a means of settling this issue.

I will speak briefly on the financial settlement and what can and should be demanded of the religious orders. The estimated cost to date of providing redress is between €1 billion and €1.3 billion. These figures, which were provided on different dates by the Comptroller and Auditor General, have not been disputed by the Department of Education and Science. It has been widely agreed by all parties in the House, both in the initial discussions and subsequently, that responsibility should be shared equally between the religious orders and the State, which has a duty in this regard. This means the religious orders need to contribute a further sum of between €500 million and €700 million. This must not be done by means of counselling or other services run by the orders. The people who were in the institutions need to have the dominant say in how that money is distributed to help in their further healing and recovery.

Court settlements are running at the rate of approximately €300,000 to €350,000 for those who have gone to the High Court. The higher settlements in the case of redress, the amounts of which we are not aware exactly, seem to be approximately €65,000. People were the victims of appalling and serious crimes that have done them bodily and mental harm, that has lived with them all of their lives and in some cases has affected their children and grandchildren. The compensation must have regard to that.

On the question of impunity and immunity, Deputy Michael D. Higgins spoke about the international conventions. The principle of the International Convention on Crimes Against Humanity, which is what these crimes constitute, is that the international community never will recognise the notion of impunity, that is, that one can be safe to carry out certain crimes because the state or states will protect him or her. Equally, there can be no immunity from prosecution. There are some cases where those involved who were the perpetrators of these dreadful crimes are very old, but old age does not diminish or wither the crimes. This is another matter the State and its law officers must address.

On the responsibility and the guilt for savage cruelty and savage sexual abuse, what is so wrong about what is emerging from the religious orders under freedom of information and was outlined in "States of Fear" is that they sought all the time to look for indemnity, and indemnity carried over into a kind of immunity and into a kind of impunity from being legally attacked over what their members had done. That also needs to be addressed.

I hope this debate is part of an ongoing process of reparation and recall by everybody about what happened and what was done in the name of religion and government but lest we forget, we still have no understanding as a society as to why so many children in this country were committed to institutions. People mark it as happening from after the Famine and because of a seed of Jansenism and extremity in the Catholic church that was probably only matched in recent times by people like the Taliban in Muslim countries.

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