Order told State to scrap vow on abuse redress

[Maurice Heaphy]

Order told State to scrap vow on abuse redress

Monday, November 04, 2013

The Government was told to scrap its pledge on the cost of the child abuse redress scheme before the most powerful religious order in education would discuss school patronage.

• By Conor Ryan

Investigative Correspondent

The demand was revealed in newly released records of a three-year stand-off between the State and congregations covered by the indemnity deal. 

The Government’s original plan had been to pursue the transfer of school properties from religious orders to bridge a perceived €500m shortfall in contributions to the redress scheme. The Sisters of Mercy said no. 

The 2011 Programme for Government said the transfers would be used to get the orders to cover 50% of the €1.5bn redress bill. 

In July, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn got Cabinet approval for a more conciliatory tack that would allow congregations to remain in control of schools but relinquish title to the land. 

According to a policy proposal put to Mr Quinn in February, the new strategy was designed to move the schools’ property debate away from the battle to get congregations to accept the 50:50 redress bill principle. 

The softer stance came after more than three years of fractious negotiations which commenced following the publication of the Ryan Report. 

The correspondence between Mr Quinn, his department, and the 18 orders covered under the indemnity deal has now been deemed eligible for release under the Freedom of Information Act. These revealed the frosty exchanges between the sides. 

The most significant struggle involved the Sisters of Mercy, which owns 96 schools worth €281m and which transferred a further 66, worth €412m, to the Ceist religious trust. 

It made an additional offer of €20m towards the new statutory fund, and property it valued at €107m. This offer was dismissed as inadequate and overvalued. 

Following meetings with the department, the order wrote a letter making it clear its voluntary contribution in response to the Ryan Report “was not a matter for negotiation”. 

It said it would not participate in any attempt by the State to revalue its post-2009 offer and it wanted the Programme for Government changed. 

“We are not willing to enter negotiations with Government towards its fulfilment of school infrastructure which it made in its Programme for Government for the transfer of school infrastructure,” the order wrote. 

In a memo to Mr Quinn, department officials said the compromised proposal, to transfer school sites without changing control, had been put to the 18 orders. Fifteen did not respond and the three that did express an interest only owned 16 schools between them.

© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved

[Gaye Dalton]

That is EXTRAORDINARY Pauline...I never realised it happened in the past.

Obviously I hve a pretty broad mind, but I have always felt that things like sex work were things children never need to know about, literally unless there is a sex worker next door...and even then...friend of mine was raised near Mount Street in  the 70s, and when he asked about the streetwalkers he was just told they were "Saucy Ladies"...and to this day can vividly remember hoping he would catch them doing something "saucy" to his child's mind..but he never did.

These days Ruhama and "Turn Off the Red Light" have teams who go into schools. Now apart from that fact that everything they have to say is pretty much independent of fact, and, when it touches on so many factual subjects, like history, geography and politics should never be allowed through a school gate, a lot of the things they say are a really graphic form of inverted pornography. 

I have heard them myself and their is seriously NO EXCUSE for speculating that explicitly on the details of other people's lived experience before ANY audience, let alone schoolchildren.

Let me try and explain what I mean. We can talk about the girls in Belgium, Germany and America who have been held as real sex slaves for years (with no connection to sex work at all). It is ok to express horror, or sympathy. It is ok to express our anger against the perps...but when we start speculating about the explicit details of what may have happened to these girls in graphic terms, we have crossed a line and probably need to seek some kind of therapy.

Ruhama, and "Turn Off the Red Light" are sending teams in to talk to teenage girls in exactly those terms every chance they get.

I have asked a LOT of Mum's if they were asked permission for such a talk (nobody ever seems to be) would they give it? So far everybody says "no" and NOT because I oppose "Turn Off the Red Light"!

[jack colleton]

grooming is going on everywhere and in so many forms.  

[Gaye Dalton]

I suppose it is a kind of grooming...though not for sexual abuse...

It is more about radical feminism, and the irrational rejection of all that is stereotypically male. Don't take this as bigotry...it isn't...I have lovely lesbian friends, but a huge proportion of the powerful opinion makers in the "Turn Off the Red Light" set up are either lesbians or celibates, yet they focus on defining and dictating male heterosexuality...as if being a perfectly ordinary, red blooded male were a shameful disease in need of a cure.

There are extremes where they raise boys as girls or "gender neutral" which is simple child abuse...

...and they treat women no better, their ideals do not resemble any version of femininity or womanhood I have ever seen. It is as if they are trying to create a culture of nosey interfering old biddies in the manner of the Waffen SS...who are either lesbians or celibate (they don't mind which as long as you abjure heterosexuality)

What they are about has NOTHING TO DO with what being a woman is about. 

[jack colleton]

i have long believed that millions of people not only have been fooled by  "feminism" but have suffered the effects of the set up!  nothing all that it seems!  all groups infiltrated or if you like mixed!  no i get it!  i really do! yes another agenda!

[Gaye Dalton]

I am in a funny place on feminism...my family were a serious nightmare in every way but one...

My mother was the third generation of self employed women, back as far as the late 60s they didn't take the idea of men and women being unequal seriously, and it stuck.

Gender equality is about giving everyone equal rights...not about trying to dictate what they should *DO* with those equal rights, or what they should aspire to.

[jack colleton]

absolutely right Gayle.  as clear as a glass of water!

[pauline jackson]

Hello gaye. Well i was in goldenbridge in th 50 ths. The nuns were obsessed with warnings. The idea was had thay not been there we would be worse off. To young for all this i like others thought she was talking about our fallen mothers. No information of course just warnings. So without any notion of the subject we dident know what we were supposed to understand. Its a discrace that this kind of thing is still going on over there.I have met sex workers who were a lot nicer more human than the Church workers.Under cover of good intentions many of thes people just dont understand human behavour. Comparing themselves to others and believing that good mothers are vergins is useless. the whole idea of sin is useless in life. But that was the moter of our schooling. it left us like snails without shells.

[Gaye Dalton]

You know something? Sex work is nothing to be ashamed of BUT...you DO NOT TELL, or even HINT to a child that their mum is a sex worker...it's not an appropriate thing for them to understand properly. When we do not understand properly it is human nature for the imagination to go to town.

(I used do a great line in convincing worried kids not to believe the rubbish they read in tabloids whenever the massage parlours their mums worked in were "exposed". Of course in those days you were dealing with Dave Mullins who never exposed anyone without warning them and kept the graphic insults and wild speculations out of it.

These days Ruhama give AWARDS to the journalists who expose sex workers and their families, and work hand in hand with them, it is just veiled intimidation. )

I had a friend who was in Goldenbridge in the 60s...she was a sex worker and alcoholic incapable of sustaining any relationships or staying in one place long who SHOULD have been a lovely and intelligent woman, so I guess what they taught at Goldenbridge did not work? And she was one of the "pets" too. 

[jack colleton]

we had an old blind man  called Mr Cox come to us to teach us the facts of life!

[Gaye Dalton]

There is something quite surreal about that.

[jack colleton]

and i had to guide him to the toilet.  i think demonstration the general inappropriateness in the  'care'  system  in ireland

[jack colleton]

snails without shells.  awesome description.  many people could relate.