Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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Question 111: To ask the Minister for Education and Science the amount paid out to date in regard to compensation payments and legal fees by the Residential Institutions Redress Board; if an estimate is available of the expected final costs in regard to each category; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [21620/07]

Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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The Residential Institutions Redress Board was established under Statute in 2002 to provide financial redress to victims of child abuse in residential institutions in order to assist them in their recovery and enhance the quality of the remainder of their lives.

I wish to advise the Deputy that expenditure associated with the Redress Board to date is approximately €714 million including €91m in legal costs. The Board has completed the process in 9,276 cases out of a total of 14,546 applications received by the Board. The average award figure currently stands at €67,755, with awards ranging up to €300,000. At this point it is estimated that a provision of some €428 million may be required to meet the remaining award, administration and legal costs, of the Board. This would bring the total cost of the scheme to an estimated €1.14 billion. Based on the total number of applications received, the final cost of the scheme may be somewhere between €1 billion and €1.3 billion, including legal and admin costs which are running at approximately 20% of awards. I should emphasise, however, that this revised estimate, like earlier estimates, is tentative as the Board has some 5,270 outstanding applications to process and the level of award in these remaining cases may vary substantially. The final cost of the scheme will not be known until the Board has completed its work, which may take up to a further 3 years.

Of course, the final cost of the redress scheme must be viewed in the context of the Government's acceptance of its responsibilities in apologising to victims of abuse and one must consider that if the scheme had not been introduced the State in all likelihood would have been engaged in civil court actions which would have been protracted and traumatic for the victims and would have resulted in the State incurring extensive legal and settlement costs. The Government in establishing the scheme considered it was the just and humane thing to do as the State was responsible for children that were placed in institutions by the courts and other public bodies. The C & AG has stated that any estimate of the ultimate liability arising from the Redress Scheme is based on assumptions which are impossible to validate and should therefore be treated in a cautionary way.