THE GOVERNMENT is to ask religious congregations named in the Ryan report to transfer ownership of schools to the State to make up a shortfall in its contribution to the €1.36 billion redress bill for victims of clerical sexual abuse.
Properties currently rented to the State will also be sought in lieu of cash or other payments, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn said yesterday.
The Ryan report, which investigated the abuse of children in institutions run by 18 religious congregations, recommended they pay half the total redress costs, a figure set at about €680 million.
To date the congregations have offered €348.5 million, or roughly a quarter of the redress bill, faced by the taxpayer to compensate victims of abuse and to cover legal costs. This offer fell “well short, by several hundred million” of what the orders should bear “towards the cost of institutional residential child abuse”, the Minister said.
Under the controversial 2002 Indemnity Agreement, the 18 congregations agreed to contribute €128 million, in cash, property and counselling services towards redress costs for abuse victims.
In 2009, following publication of the Ryan report, they proposed contributing just over € 100 million in cash and offered to transfer property, mainly in health and education areas, which they valued at €235.5 million, to the State and voluntary organisations.
Expressing his disappointment at the level of contributions proposed by the congregations, Mr Quinn said that, of those properties which the congregations offered “only 12 have been identified as of potential immediate benefit to the State and these will be pursued”.
Only a quarter of the total property offers made to date by the congregations “are of current interest to the State”, he said, adding “the value of these 12 properties, based on the congregations’ own valuations, is approximately € 60 million.”
He said “despite the State’s call for the congregations to supplement their original offers, only two out of the 18 congregations have replied positively”.
“One congregation has offered to give € 1 million towards the costs of the National Children’s Hospital and to refund some or all of its legal costs, while another offered to transfer a former primary school. None of the other congregations have supplemented their original offers,” he said.
He recalled how last April “I called on the orders to consider handing over appropriate school infrastructure as a way to make progress towards the 50:50 target contribution. I reiterate that call now.”
He added he had written to the congregations “seeking a meeting to discuss their response to date”.
Noting there had been no formal contact by government with the congregations since April 2010, he criticised his ministerial predecessor Mary Coughlan for “the big time lapse” and for “not pursuing it with the vigour required”.
Any transfer of properties to the State may be complicated by a decision by religious congregations to move ownership of schools into trusts in recent years.
In 2008, the Edmund Rice Trust assumed ownership of Christian Brothers and Presentation schools, while the previous year five female religious congregations, including the Sisters of Mercy and Daughters of Charity, transferred more than 100 secondary schools to Catholic Education an Irish Schools Trust.
The Department of Education said Mr Quinn would seek “the congregations’ agreement to a legal mechanism which would ensure that title to school infrastructure properties would be transferred to the State, at the State’s request, and that title to such properties could not be altered, whether by sale on the open market or by transfer into any trust arrangement, without the prior consent of the department”.
