Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

The subject matter of this debate is a painful and harrowing aspect of our past. The Government and the Taoiseach deserve great credit for facing up squarely to this issue with all its painful aspects. It is never easy for a State or a Government to apologise or to accept that grievous wrong happened in the past for which it is accepting some degree of responsibility. I regret the degree of conflict that has arisen between Ms Justice Laffoy and the Government and the Department. As has been said already, she has done very good work which is now being carried on by Mr. Ryan.

I would like to bring a few perspectives to bear on aspects of this debate. We are quite wrong to think we are the only country to face this type of problem and that it is a particular indictment of our society as opposed to others. Many of these things happened in other countries and to varying degrees they have been exposed. For example, in Australia there was its treatment of the Aborigines. One thinks of the sterilisation polices of certain Nordic countries and the abuse of children in other countries.

I would not necessarily criticise the Department of Finance at the end of 2002 because demands for more resources should be looked at critically. All of us have some problems with the way our various tribunals have been operating. I would like to think that perhaps in the future when setting up tribunals we would set a finite period in which a tribunal would carry out its work. It would then be up to the tribunal chairman to prioritise the inquiries to ensure that aim was achieved.

This will cause horror in the legal profession. We are not talking about courts of law but tribunals and whether tribunal lawyers should be salaried and whether particular fees should be set in advance in the same way as the VHI does for certain medical operations. Lawyers can decide whether they want to take up the work. Many of our problems have to do with the exorbitant costs of the legal process. I do not accept that absolutely nothing can be done about that.

There is no real understanding by tribunals of the difficulty of retrieving documentation from Departments from the relatively recent period let alone the distant past. At the time I entered the EU division of the Department of Foreign Affairs, if I wanted to find out what had happened 18 months previously, I would have to retrieve perhaps 18 different files. It is by no means easy.

I hope there is no suggestion that anybody in the Department of Education and Science is in some way trying to protect or cover up what happened 20, 30 or 40 years ago, which I do not believe to be the case. We are talking about paper rather than computer files and all tribunals significantly underestimate the difficulty of finding the documentation required. Files go missing or cannot be found, not necessarily from sinister motives.

I do not agree with suggestions that responsibility for this issue be shifted to the Taoiseach's office, which would be quite inappropriate. The Taoiseach has more than enough to deal with without taking on questions extraneous to his main duties. Over the past ten years, under different Taoisigh, there have been attempts to move out many of the matters which are not central to the responsibilities of the Taoiseach.

Regarding people in religious orders being wrongly accused, the current climate is unfortunately such as could be conducive in some, I hope limited, instances to the making of false or partly false allegations. People are entitled to protect their reputations and one cannot adopt the attitude that once an allegation is made, all are guilty.

Reference was made by Senator Feeney to a newspaper article this morning. I deprecate — a mild word to use — attempts by certain commentators and commentaries to blacken or vilify the entire role of the Catholic church in this country, particularly when working with public authorities or, going even further, to use it to try to denigrate the entire record of the State since independence. That is wholly unjustified. At the time, when resources were sparse, the church through various social welfare agencies did its best to supply basic needs. We are discussing a dark side and should not attempt to minimise the seriousness of that. However, we should not try to use those episodes to underwrite a blanket indictment.

In an entirely different context, I spoke last week on an authoritarian culture. Although its extent can be exaggerated beyond all reason, there is no doubt there was a more authoritarian culture in this country 30, 40 and 50 years ago and I am glad we have moved beyond that. The drawback of that culture was not that those in authority set out to systematically abuse vulnerable individuals but that there was not the degree of questioning and accountability inside and outside of institutions. This meant that abuses were able to go undetected or to be brushed under the carpet. To that extent, I am glad we have moved away from that culture.

I wish the tribunal under a new judge every success with its work and hope it will be able to conclude this work, for the sake of victims more than anyone else, with a reasonable degree of expeditiousness.