Dempsey press briefing: The Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, conceded last night that the Government had made mistakes on the child abuse inquiry.
But Mr Dempsey said he was surprised when Ms Justice Laffoy resigned from the inquiry last week and contested crucial aspects of her criticisms of the Government in her resignation letter.
"I don't accept the underlying implication of a deliberate attempt by the Government to prevent anything from happening," he said. He could not accept the judge's complaints about the 11 months taken for legislation on a compensation package for victims to be passed.
He also said the Government could not be blamed for the delay in the agreement on legal fees for lawyers acting at the inquiry.
The Government's position was that the principal problem had not been simply a matter of resources.
The Minister also admitted that the Government had approved heads of a Bill to reform the inquiry last April based on the first review of the inquiry even though there were doubts within the Cabinet that that review had addressed the problems that had emerged.
The second review was initiated just a week after the original Bill was approved by the Government.
Mr Dempsey said it was not tenable for the inquiry to continue in its current form as its work might continue for up to 11 years. But he conceded that doubling the staff would have shortened the investigation by up to six years. "Five to seven years is still too long." While this appears to question the Government's use of the 11-year estimate to justify its two reviews, Mr Dempsey said the lower estimate was not valid because no additional staff were hired.
He also insisted it was reasonable for the Government to request the inquiry to hire additional staff on a short-term contract only because the review was under way at that time. "She got the extra staff as far as we were concerned," he said.
Legal costs of up to €200 million created a further sense of "profound unease", he said.
"This is to produce a report to tell us that abuse took place in the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s in Ireland. I don't think that there is anybody in this room or in Ireland that needs to be told that abuse took place." Mr Dempsey said it was logical for the Department of Education to continue as sponsoring Department for the inquiry even though the inquiry is investigating its activities.
However, he accepted that anything that went wrong during the investigations was treated very suspiciously by the judge and her team.
The Minister also indicated regret that the Christian Brothers had chosen to challenge Ms Laffoy's inquiry in the High Court.
The outcome of this challenge, which questions the basis of investigations into events decades ago, will have a crucial bearing on the Government's formal proposals to reform the inquiry.
When it was put to Mr Dempsey that the Government had indemnified religious congregations only to see its own inquiry frustrated by the legal challenge taken by one of those congregations, he said he would like to see the religious orders take a more co-operative and less legalistic stance.
While the inquiry's work was designed with "truth and reconciliation" in mind, the investigations had become bogged down in trials within trials, he said.
