DUBLIN — Bowing to government pressure, 18 Roman Catholic religious orders that had abused thousands of Irish children pledged today to allow external audits of their finances and to establish an entirely new compensation fund for victims.
The promise came after leaders of the orders met for three hours with Prime Minister Brian Cowen, who bluntly criticized their refusal to accept the magnitude of the harm they did to generations of children by chronically shielding abusers.
Later, the 18 groups said in a joint statement they would “make financial and other contributions toward a broad range of measures designed to alleviate the hurt caused to people who were abused in their care.”
“Each congregation is fully committed to identifying its resources, both financial and other, within a transparent process with a view to delivering upon commitments made today,” the nuns and brothers said.
The orders agreed to a government demand to accept, for the first time, an external audit to determine their net worth, a measurement that will be used to determine what more they can contribute. Victims’ advocates claim the orders have been using sophisticated financial shell games to hide their true net worth.
The government said it welcomed the Catholic leaders’ commitments.
The groups, however, did not commit to any specific new financial figure for victims beyond what they agreed to in a 2002 deal with the Irish government.
Cowen said the goodness of the orders’ original missions — to provide shelter and support to children deemed petty criminals or products of dysfunctional homes from the 19th century to the 1990s — “will be forever stained by the failings and abuses which are now a matter of public record.”
He said while today’s church leaders were trying to repair damage done by previous generations, they also were guilty of their own severe abuses — of sheltering sex abusers within their ranks and denying victims fair compensation and justice.
Both sides agreed to meet again in two weeks.
The church leaders’ negotiations with Cowen and other senior Cabinet ministers came two weeks after the publication of an investigation into six decades of beatings, molestation and humiliation in church-run institutions for castaway children.
The findings — in which nuns and brothers were found to have consistently sheltered serial abusers from prosecution from the 1930s to 1990s — shocked and disgusted this predominantly Catholic nation.
Government leaders said they expect the Catholic orders to pay much more to 14,000 victims of the now-closed network of workhouse-style schools, reformatories and orphanages.
In 2002, when the congregations were denying the scale of the child abuse and the investigation was just beginning, the orders negotiated a controversial deal with the government that capped the church’s contribution to victims at euro128 million ($180 million). In exchange, the government established a compensation system that required victims to surrender their rights to sue the church and state in exchange for payouts averaging euro65,000.
Claims flooded in from Ireland and worldwide. The estimated total bill to taxpayers now exceeds euro1.1 billion ($1.5 billion), while church leaders admit they haven’t even reached their euro128 million commitment — despite owning a property portfolio of schools, hospitals and other assets worth more than euro500 million.
Victims groups and opposition leaders say the church groups should foot half of the compensation bill.
Cowen said it was premature to specify any new target for the orders but added, “Further substantial contributions are required.”
Lawyers representing abuse victims accuse Catholic orders in Ireland and abroad of sheltering their most valuable assets, particularly schools, in independent corporations or by transferring ownership to particular brothers or nuns.
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