Brendan Ryan (Labour)

To open the Minister's mind to amendments, I will point out an error which is more serious than a drafting error. It is in page 18, line 7, which refers to the Ombudsman. The legislation states: "Where, following an investigation under this Act into an action, it appears to the Ombudsman that the action adversely affected a person by or on whose behalf an application was . . ." However, "affected a person by" should be changed to "affected a person by whom". Otherwise it is entirely meaningless. This needs to be amended. I have consulted the authorities and the error is too significant to be deemed a drafting error. As the subsection stands, only people who had an application made on their behalf could be the subject of an investigation by the Ombudsman. We will obviously submit an amendment but it is really a job for the parliamentary draftsperson to notice these problems.

When I was less than nine years old, I had the experience not of sexual abuse but of the most horrendous verbal and emotional abuse by a teacher. I was among the brightest in the class and the teacher was just disturbed. He is now deceased. However, his impact on me over 50 years ago is part of what I have had to live with ever since. It was quite extraordinary. Apart from those who have horrific stories of sexual abuse, there is a great number of people who were victims of the sort of people who seemed to believe it was acceptable to terrorise small children.

As I stated on the last occasion this matter was dealt with in the House, we genuinely need to reflect on what happened in this regard and why it happens. It happened because power was abused. It is not essentially about sex although that is the symptom. It is about people who used positions of power to abuse those over whom they had power. It happened because society deferred to power and authority, as was the case in many other countries.

I get a little tired when I hear people talk about the current lack of respect for authority. In Ireland, authority created the lack of respect for itself because, in the church and State, authority and the power that went with it were systematically abused by so many people. The knowledge of that systematic abuse, which was much more widespread than the abuse, was also suppressed by people in the interest of protecting power structures in church and State. I will return to this subject because it raises issues.

The liberal agenda, which is much maligned by many of those who would claim to be defenders of the status quo and to have family values, is the reason we now can talk about these issues. A cultural change in our country transformed people's outlook such that they felt, for the first time, able to talk about abuses perpetrated on them. They felt they would be listened to. Had they made such revelations 25 years earlier, they would have been sent home with a clip on the ear and told not to be thinking up such dirty stories. This is what happened to many people.

I stated before in the House that the foregoing abuses happened in what many would consider the good old days, in which the country was deemed a nicer place to be. It was not nicer and those days were not good old days. For a considerable section of society, they were horrible days in which the abuse of power and authority and physical and sexual abuse were capable of being perpetrated without accountability. There was nothing good about those old days; they were dreadful times.

We must deal with this legislation in the context of the hurt felt by victims of abuse. This is why I find it so regrettable that the Government managed to move at such an extraordinarily slow pace on these issues.

I remember reading the occasional interim reports of Ms Justice Laffoy. The account of her record is almost on a scale that would do justice to Stalin at his best given the way in which it was left out of the Minister's speeches in both this House and the other House. One would not think there had been a Ms Justice Laffoy who carried out an investigation and resigned. The truth is that Ms Justice Laffoy was frustrated by the delay of the Department of Education and Science in providing her with documentation and by the Government over its failure to provide her with the funding she requested and its decision to conduct reviews when she asked for resources.

There was a great delay before we reached this stage. It is no great credit to the Government and our public administration system that this is the case. Only in Ireland could one believe a six-year period from the time of the Taoiseach's apology to the middle of June 2005 is an acceptable period in which to deal with a matter as sensitive and horrendous as that about which we are talking. I do not understand our concept of efficient public administration. One is tempted to attribute motives but I will not do so. However, those who say this is not appropriate business to be handled by the Department of Education and Science have an extremely valid point.

I have a copy of a letter from a person in the midlands, which was sent to the Minister on 19 June. She will probably know who it is from but I do not want to mention names. The point made in the letter is that there are still people working in the Department of Education and Science who are involved in what the sender alleges to have been delays in the processing of the Donal Dunne case in that Department. It is difficult to know how one could ever reassure the victims of that particular outrage given that a Department delayed and ignored the complaints that this individual made and did not do anything about them. How could anybody have faith in the Department's ability when there are people therein who were around when many of these abuses were being covered up, if not being carried out?

My experience and that of the Acting Chairman's former colleague, Pat Gallagher, in dealing with the Department of Education and Science regarding this issue is not the sort of experience that would inspire confidence. This did not happen 30 years ago. Mr. Pat Gallagher got access to the Department of Education and Science records in the late 1990s after a long series of delays and obstructions. When he finally got access he was told he could see but not copy them. What sense of openness, accountability and transparency can justify that, other than obfuscation and delay? When one sees that particular value system transferred into how Ms Justice Laffoy was frustrated, as she concluded she was, then it is understandable that people who have been at the receiving end of this abuse believe this is not the appropriate Department to deal with them.

It has been said to the Minister over and over again that this matter should be dealt with by the Department of the Taoiseach, not by the Department of Education and Science. There is a perceptible and perceived conflict of interest where the body that should have been responsible for protecting these victims is responsible for the investigation into what happened. I know the Department does not have a single identity and I accept there are many people working there, but from a perception viewpoint it is profoundly wrong.

Moving on to the legislation, I do not doubt the problems that arose. However, again in that letter, which the Minister received, the question arose as to precisely what stage the investigations are at. How many people will be further affected by the requirement under the previous legislation for each individual allegation to have a separate hearing? The Minister has been asked on a number of occasions to put some numbers on the real situation now as distinct from that which people thought would be the case. So far, we have no numbers.

As regards the Minister's rationalisation in her speech, I accept there are difficulties. However, we need to ensure we know precisely that one of the reasons for the scheme the commission is now putting in place is to reduce "the likelihood of people who are less able for adversarial hearings being subjected to examination and cross-examination before gatherings of lawyers and other interested parties". That is a very humane objective. One does not need to end up telling people who want a full hearing that they cannot have it, however, in order to protect people who do not want to go through an adversarial process.

Again, the same letter which the Minister has refers to this individual:

I do not know why I was excluded from the hearings on the emergence of abuse, or whether I will be given an opportunity to give such evidence in the future. I do know that the wrong impression was sent out to the public at that time and I had no opportunity to give the other side of the story.

These are matters that ought to concern us, when somebody such as this individual, who has a record of attempting to expose child abuse, feels like that about this issue. He believes he is not being responded to by the Minister and Department responsible. That is a great pity.

I want to refer also to the redress board and to a communication I got from an individual. This suggests there has been a significant number of suicides among people just before they went before the redress board or just afterwards. Has the Minister any information on this? It is extremely disturbing. I have diluted what the individual said to me, on purpose, but the evidence was quite strong. Another upsetting aspect about the redress board, as instanced to me by people who had appeared before it, is that the culture is strongly reminiscent of the culture in which they were abused, which is, in effect: "It is our secret. Do not tell anybody. If you behave yourself I will give you the sweets. If you do not behave yourself, we will bring you to court." I am sure that this was never the intention. There is genuine concern that the redress board is a harrowing experience for the people who go through it. It really needs to be investigated further. I would like to know whether we can have at least some views as regards the victims of child abuse who have gone through the redress board. We could have an independent evaluation. I can understand the problems about confidentiality, to avoid people being named. I cannot understand why we cannot have high-powered professional evaluation of that.

I welcome the Bill in so far as it goes. We will table a number of amendments, one of which is absolutely necessary, otherwise the phrase "on the Ombudsman" is potentially meaningless. There are a number of others which will attempt to clarify and quantify the scale of the problem which it is alleged we need to address, in terms of reducing the right of everybody to have a full hearing.