Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister for Education and Skills to the House and thank him for coming in to deal with this matter. This matter relates to Caranua. We need to rehearse how Caranua come about. It came about as a follow-on from the indemnity agreement formally agreed between the then Government, not a Fine Gael Government, and the Conference of Religious of Ireland, CORI. That indemnity scheme was entered into by the State with the Catholic Church against all legal claims for compensation arising from past child abuse in church-run residential institutions. I took the time this morning to read the debates in the Dáil and the Seanad at the time. Deputy Róisín Shortall described it as a cheap insurance policy for religious institutions that had no effective State oversight. There is no point in rehearsing all that but that is the reality. It was a bad deal for everyone and we know it cannot be renegotiated. We also know that many of the people who were part of that deal did not deliver and simply did not honour what they were meant to do in terms of giving over lands or funding. Again, that is history and we must move on.

What came out of it was this Caranua scheme which was to assist victims, or survivors, of abuse, because that is what they were, who had either come through the redress scheme or through some sort of court or settlement agreement by either arbitration or litigation. A large advertisement appeared in a number of Sunday newspapers - I do not know why it needed to be that size - telling people that they have until 1 August to put in a claim. This advertisement refers to funds, with the implication that it is running out of funds. I put it to the Minister that Caranua should not be scaled down. It needs to be reformed and there are issues about its governance about which the Minister knows. There needs to be a review of it but it would be wholly wrong to wind down an organisation that was set up to support and assist victims of abuse - abuse in its widest form, including sexual abuse, emotional abuse and physical abuse. Even in the past few days, we have heard so much about the Magdalen laundries. We have heard so much from men who have come out of the Army with serious mental health issues as a result of them being victims and survivors. We have heard so much about many organisations.

Let us not this week confirm that we are winding down an organisation that was meant to be funded, or co-funded, by Government and by the redress scheme to help victims of abuse. I will be interested to hear the Minister's response.