Fiona O'Loughlin (Kildare South, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Child sexual abuse is one of the most shameful aspects of the country's history. As Graham Green said, "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." When that door opens, how wrong it is to allow a trusted person, a teacher, to exploit and claim a child's innocence which in many ways leads to a difficult future for the child.

Our long history of failing to protect vulnerable members of society was highlighted again last year in the Grace case, with the horrendous revelations about the Tuam mother and baby home. They were only the latest shocking stories in a catalogue of abuse and neglect suffered by children at the hands of official Ireland. As far back as 1931, the unpublished Carrigan report identified an alarming amount of sexual crime and criminal interference in schools with children, aged 16 years downwards. However, despite the unavoidable awareness of what was taking place, the then Department of Education adopted a policy of avoiding culpability and instructed schools to direct complaints to school managers - parish priests - with no Department involvement whatsoever.

Louise O'Keeffe had to fight for years to make the State accept responsibility for the breach of her human rights in failing to protect her from abuse in Dunderrow national school in the 1970s. This eight year old child was let down in the most grievous manner by her school and the State, yet the Government tried to evade liability, insisting that the board of management held responsibility. She fought in the High Court and the Supreme Court and even faced losing her home to pay all of the legal costs involved. The O'Keeffe judgment of the European Court of Human Rights held that there had been a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment, and Article 13, which sets out the right to an effective remedy. We owe Ms O'Keeffe a huge debt of gratitude for blowing this wide open. The court also ruled that there was an inherent obligation on a government to use special measures and safeguards to protect children from ill-treatment, especially in primary education when they were under the exclusive control of school authorities.

These safeguards were sadly lacking in many of our schools in the past.

The subsequent redress scheme, as interpreted by the Government, is completely unjust, requiring that applicants show their abuser to have been the subject of a prior complaint. The redress scheme, as we know, limits redress to those victims who could establish that their abuse had occurred in the aftermath of a prior complaint which had not been acted upon. This goes against all international research findings showing that the vast majority of survivors of child sexual abuse do not disclose the abuse or wait a significant period before doing so. Louise O'Keeffe’s abuser, Leo Hickey, abused more than 20 children, yet we know only one complaint was made at that time.

Fianna Fáil proposes to allow victims of abuse in primary schools, whose abusers have been convicted in the courts, to qualify for compensation under the scheme without the requirement of a prior complaint. I commend this motion because child abuse and neglect offend the basic values of our State and society and we have a responsibility to provide adequate redress to those we have failed so badly in the past.

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