Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-23
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Micheál Martin (FF), Cork South-Central

I thank the Deputy for raising this issue. If we look back over the last three decades, we have had numerous episodes or revelations pertaining to institutions both public and private in respect of child sexual abuse. It has been quite horrific. I refer to governments from about the late 1990s onwards and the 1999 period onwards when we first initiated the inquiry into industrial schools. I recall the anger when the State paid up close to €1 billion in redress. Everybody attacked the government of the day, of which I was a member, because the accusation was we left the religious off. I never accepted this fully by the way because I felt the State had culpability there too, in terms of inspectorial reports and so on. The State always had culpability in respect of its involvement in the industrial schools. As to the capacity to get money at the time, we did not want to put victims and survivors at that time through years and years of courts. Then, we had the swimming abuse inquiry. We had a series of diocesan inquiries, which the government initiated against Cloyne and against Dublin. I remember the Ferns inquiry, for example, and further abuses and revelations right up to the present day in respect of the Spiritans and of schools more generally.
We are now in a situation where we have a comprehensive commission of inquiry into schools, which we did not have before. The situation has evolved. There was a time prior to the nineties when the State did not habitually establish commissions of inquiry into abuse, but from the late 1990s onwards Irish society was opened up in many respects. It was not opened up completely, not comprehensively, but in many respects. A torrent of abuse has emerged in all aspects of life, it seems to me. We can look at the SAVI report going back along and the context in which it reported in respect of its estimations of the nature of abuse.
That said, on religious orders, the Government's position on the Labour Party's legislation will be a six-month timed amendment. We believe it aligns with Government policy. We are not in disagreement with the intent or purpose of what the Labour Party is proposing legislatively. We will support that. We are entering into mediation in respect of Dunderrow. We will try to progress that as quickly and as effectively as we can, while also knowing we have a broader issue to deal with, as the Deputy has said, in respect of the interdepartmental group.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-23