Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

I welcome the introduction of this Bill. It is worthwhile to bring renewed focus on child abuse in the State. The story is far from over. We await the outcome of the report on child abuse in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin. The revelations in that report will concentrate our minds on the major challenge to address the State and the churches dramatically failing the most vulnerable in Irish society.

I refer to the transparency of religious institutions. This is a commendable part of the Bill. For far too long, religious institutions have kept their assets away from the scrutiny of the public. We need complete transparency about the assets of religious institutions in the State. Different institutions use different mechanisms to shield their assets from the view of the public. Some religious institutions try to show this information but it should be done in a transparent manner so that we can find out what lands and buildings are owned by churches and the value of these. This would more fully inform the discussion on retribution and payments to the innocents and those who suffered in the past.

In the age of the Internet it should be possible, through Google Maps or another application, to point out that the Catholic church owns a site of more than ten acres within a mile of O'Connell Street, the Archbishop's Palace in Drumcondra. It is equally important to know that the Church of Ireland has a substantial landholding in Rathmines, one of the inner suburbs of Dublin. These holdings should be on the public record and we should know the value of them. Where blame is laid at a religious institution, we should consider the full market value of its assets in deciding what to do.

Section 4 of the Labour Party's Institutional Child Abuse Bill includes a commendable provision that this information should be clearly available on the public record. In the case of the Christian Brothers in Canada, assets appear to have been moved offshore and various legal mechanisms were used that are more common to tax havens in the Caribbean than to a religious institution that should be cherishing the most vulnerable in society.

I take the point of the Minister for Education and Science that it is premature to proceed with the Bill now. Perhaps we should revisit this in the autumn, by which time we will have the report on the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin. It is time to look in forensic detail at the assets owned by religious institutions, particularly those who failed the most vulnerable in the State.

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