Civil Liability (Child Sexual Abuse Proceedings Against Unincorporated Bodies of Persons) Bill 2025: Second Stage [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-25
============================================================

Ivana Bacik (LAB), Dublin Bay South

In the first instance, I thank my own Labour colleagues, Deputies Ahern and Sheehan, and the representatives and speakers from other parties who supported this important Bill. I thank the Minister for his engagement on the Bill too. Listening carefully to what he said, he spoke in encouraging terms about the principle behind the Bill. He spoke about the need for people to be able to access the courts and secure redress in a readily accessible manner. He spoke earlier with great clarity about the current difficulties that arise for anyone who seeks to pursue an unincorporated association through the courts. Indeed, Deputy Cummins gave a pertinent example of somebody seeking to pursue the Christian Brothers. Deputy Ahern referred to the Christian Brothers too and having to name 120 individual members. That is the difficulty. The Christian Brothers, through the establishment of the lay-run trust, the Edmund Rice Schools Trust, divested a great deal of assets into that lay-run trust. That is precisely the mechanism that we are seeking to address in this Bill. I thank all of those survivors with whom I have spoken and who have been so courageous in coming forward over the years to disclose about the impact of abuse upon them. I thank the Minister for acknowledging the impact survivors can have on shaping policy. We are seeing that with the debate today on this Bill. It is important to acknowledge.
Deputy O'Rourke commented that the Minister used the word "complex" quite a number of times. The Minister used it again in his response. I am disappointed that this is used as the device to justify the six-month delay. I was disappointed also to hear the Minister's reference to the likely publication date of that long-awaited Law Reform Commission report into unincorporated associations. I think the Minister said it is not due until early 2028. That will be six years after the consultation paper was published. My concern is that will then become another - the Minister was referencing it today - pre-emptive delaying device and that, in fact, the Minister will not be able to support any Bill until after that date. He did not indicate that the interdepartmental group report might be brought forward. The Taoiseach indicated on Tuesday in his response to me that this publication date would not be as late as May 2027 and that it might be earlier. I would welcome some clarity on that. I can speak to the Minister afterward about that.
I want to come back to that point of complexity. Yes, there are complex matters here, but, at its core, this is straightforward. We are talking about a mechanism or legal tactic being used by religious orders. I have referred to it previously as a sort of "developer's wife" tactic, where the religious order bears the liability, as typically a male developer would.
It transfers its assets into the lay-run trust as the developer would have transferred assets to their spouse - in a gendered way, typically to the wife - and the owner of the assets is therefore beyond the reach of legal accountability, given that the spouse does not have the liability whereas the person liable no longer possesses the assets. That is the simplest way to describe what this mechanism is. Our Bill is a way of getting around that and lifting the veil, lifting the obstruction and making it easier to sue because, as the Minister said himself, and I made a note of his word, it is implausible currently that you have to sue every member of a religious order in order to pursue religious orders as unincorporated associations. I should say I have some experience: I was taken to the courts as a student union officer, indeed threatened with prison, many years ago for providing women with information on abortion but we were pursued as individuals through the courts because we were officers of an unincorporated association and the union could not be sued as a students' union at the time. Therefore, I am well aware of the mechanisms behind this. Our Bill is very carefully drafted to make sure that it only applies in narrow circumstances. Under section 2, which sets out the circumstances where the legal curtain can be lifted, the wrongdoer is a member of the unincorporated association and the plaintiff was sexually abused as a child. Section 5 sets out how the court appoints the proper defendant. I thought the Minister quoted approvingly the device we put in here. We have set out very careful criteria for when an associated trust can be pursued. Therefore, the Bill is carefully drafted and narrowly focused.
The Minister put particular focus on section 8 and the lifting of the proviso around the Statute of Limitations and indicated that that was particularly complex. I acknowledge that, and I acknowledge that we are looking to provide for a sort of retrospective effect. That, of course, has consequences, but I am very happy along with Labour colleagues and, I think, colleagues across the Opposition to work with the Minister and the Attorney General’s office to address any issues in this regard on Committee Stage.
The Minister proposes to defer this until Christmas Day, which Deputy Ahern described as the anti-Santa approach, although it is more like a Scrooge approach really. My concern is that that will delay our ability to confer with the Attorney General or move to Committee Stage. No doubt we will then be told to wait until May 2027 for the IDG report and then to wait until early 2028 for the Law Reform Commission report. That is just delaying justice and delaying redress for survivors. That is really important because it will mean that survivors will continue to face obstacles and obstructions in looking to pursue religious orders through the courts, because they will have to go through this crazy process where you have to name all the individuals, the orders may or may not provide the nominated name and so on. Survivors should not have to go to court.
The other purpose of the Bill is to provide a leverage for the State in negotiating with the religious orders to get the fair share of redress paid. Currently, State bodies, and the Department of education in particular, are at a huge disadvantage in seeking orders to come forward and pay their share, as Sheila Nunan discovered. Deputy Sheehan referred to the difficulties and complexity in trying to get the religious orders to come forward. I think the language used was “a mixed response” from religious orders when they were asked to make voluntary contributions to the State. It was mixed because the State has no sanction. The State cannot say to religious orders that if they do not pay up voluntarily, then it will compel them, as there is currently no power of compulsion.
At its core, this Bill is simple. It is about trying to unblock the current obstructions that lie in the way of pursuing religious orders. It is about lifting an obstruction to justice for survivors. So many survivors have come forward and asked that this Bill be progressed and that we see a speedier and more urgent response from the Government. Just yesterday, I heard from a mother whose son, who is non-verbal, was physically and sexually abused while in the care of a particular religious order. She asked what prospect there was for non-verbal children. That is a specific question and one of many that have been put to me. I submitted a parliamentary question on that particular issue. There are many heartbreaking stories of the distress, trauma, deep hurt and damage, and life-long consequences of abuse upon many survivors yet there is a failure to be able to secure accountability from the religious orders that were responsible in many cases.
Others have referred rightly to the bigger picture here, that being, the immense power that the church and religious orders wielded for many decades through the State, and the sort of shadow welfare state that the Catholic church operated in running industrial schools, mother and baby homes, Magdalen institutions and many other institutions in which vulnerable persons, women and children primarily, were incarcerated for many shameful decades. The church and the religious orders continue to wield enormous power in our education system through the patronage model. Ninety percent of our primary schools are still under the patronage of the Catholic church and the religious orders, so that power remains. This Bill is one small attempt to get behind the power and the wealth, let us name it, of these religious institutions. The report that others and I referenced earlier noted €1.3 billion of assets held in cash and property by eight religious orders. That is an enormous sum of money. It should be accessible to survivors of abuse and to State bodies that are seeking to do right now by survivors whom they failed for so long.
This Bill is aligned with stated Government policy and priorities in seeking to pursue and make accountable religious orders that have escaped accountability for far too long. The scale of this is astounding.
I welcomed earlier the movements made on the commission of investigation into abuse in schools but look at the scoping inquiry of 2024. What does it tell us? There were 2,400 allegations of abuse in 308 schools, with more than a quarter originating in facilities for children with special needs. It is absolutely shocking. There were 884 alleged abusers in 42 religious orders. We only know what is the tip of the iceberg. We have relied so much on the bravery of individual survivors to come forward but clearly there is an enormous mountain of undisclosed trauma that is still there among many people who were abused. Listen to the accounts from Dunderrow and those women who are still reliving the trauma of being abused in a systematic, calculated fashion by Leo Hickey. That is the sort of trauma that we are now beginning to uncover. As the oppressive Catholic church doctrine is lifting from the laws of the State, and the Minister reminded us about that with the disregard law this week, which we welcome, we know now how much we have to do to do right by survivors. This Bill represents just one way that we can do right by survivors. I urge the Minister to drop the six-month delay. We have to oppose it. We want to see this Bill pass into law as swiftly as possible to do right by survivors.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-06-25/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-25