Written answers
Thursday, 23 May 2013
Department of Education and Skills
Residential Institutions Redress Scheme
Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)
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53. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the reason the Good Shepard Mother and Baby Home, Dunboyne, County Meath, has not been included under the scheme of State involvement in religious run residential institutions; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [24920/13]
Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour)
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The Schedule to the Residential Institutions Redress Act, 2002 included 123 specified institutions and section 4 of the Act enabled the Minister for Education and Science to provide for the insertion into the Schedule of
"any industrial school, reformatory school, orphanage, children's home, special school which was established for the purpose of providing education services to children with a physical or intellectual disability or a hospital providing medical or psychiatric services to people with a physical or mental disability or mental illness in which children were placed and resident and in respect of which a public body had a regulatory or inspection function."Two Orders were made specifying 16 additional institutions, in November 2004 and July 2005, bringing the total number of scheduled institutions to 139. Since then, no further institutions have been added to the Schedule. Following the publication of the Ryan Report in May 2009, there were a range of demands for the redress scheme to be extended, including demands to include specific institutions and categories of institutions. Having considered these demands, the then Government announced its decision not to revise the arrangements in its press statement of 15th April, 2010.
The closing date for receipt of applications by the Redress Board was 15th December, 2005. The Board could however accept late applications in exceptional circumstances, up until September 2011. The Board is currently finalising the remaining applications it received.
Requests to include Mother and Baby Homes in the Schedule were refused as they did not satisfy the eligibility conditions of section 4. St Patrick's Mother and Baby Home was included on the basis that it also operated as children's home and therefore came within the scope of section 4.
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