The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre has said that victims of abuse could be driven back into silence following "extreme language and disparaging remarks" made at a press conference in Dublin yesterday.
Ms Angela McCarthy, from the centre, said it could also "encourage a new myth or form of denial, namely that a large percentage of abuse allegations are false, malicious or driven by a desire for compensation".
She pointed to a Royal College of Surgeons' study published in 2002. It found that 30 per cent of Irish women and 24 per cent of Irish men had experienced some form of child sexual abuse, with 5.6 per cent of women and 2.7 per cent of men raped as children or young adolescents. It also found that 41 per cent of the abused had never told another person about the abuse.
At the press conference, Ms Margaret Jervis, legal adviser to the British False Memory Society (BFMS), said the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse encouraged people who had not been abused to seek compensation and to accuse innocent people of abusing them.
Ms Florence Horsman Hogan, of the Let Our Voices Emerge (LOVE) group, said that "more than 30 per cent" of abuse allegations in Ireland were false.
Ms Jervis described the therapy system as "a machine for manufacturing false allegations" and said there was "a trend for people with problems in their adult lives to be made to think they had problems as a child, whether they could remember them or not".
Counsellors, rape crisis centres and therapists who encouraged people to say their problems were due to past abuse, were indulging in "a very, very damaging process where people who believed (they had been abused) were concerned".
Such people then "live a false nightmare", she said, and accused "this industry" of the "corruption of young lives". She also felt some survivor groups engaged in "methods of unreliable therapy and narrative production".
Ms Jervis said a small group of people falsely accused of abuse had gathered, at her suggestion, in a Dublin hotel room yesterday. She was providing them with analysis and information, she said. She did not know how many members BFMS had in Ireland. A former journalist, she had a post-graduate diploma in law from Bristol University, she said, but had never practised law.
Yesterday's meeting and press conference was facilitated, not sponsored, by LOVE, she said, and was BFMS's first in Ireland. She felt "very strongly about truth and justice", and got "very angry with people who distort things".
Mr John Kelly, of Irish-Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA), accused BFMS and LOVE of being "engaged in a diabolical alliance designed to attack the integrity of thousands of survivors of Ireland's industrial schools system".
Mr Colm O'Gorman, of the One in Four group, said Ms Jervis's comments on the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse illustrated "total ignorance" of its work.
One in Four's clinical director, Ms Therese Gaynor, described her comments and those of Ms Horsman Hogan as "ill-informed . . . (and) deeply offensive to women and men who have experienced sexual abuse and/or sexual violence".
