February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It has been left rudderless, with its key investigative arm now suspended.
Within 24 hours of Education Minister Noel Dempsey having announced he planned legislation to streamline the 4-year-old Commission to Inquire in Child Abuse, its chairperson, High Court judge Mary Laffoy, said she was retiring. Laffoy said last Wednesday that the panel has been rendered “powerless” and has accused the government of failing to “properly enable” her probe as required by the Oireachtas, which set it up.
The judge will step down in November after she publishes an interim report. Meanwhile, the commission’s more powerful “name and shame” investigation tier has been stopped in its tracks, she said, for “legal, practical and financial reasons.”
The disarray has resulted in the taoiseach and his ministers receiving a hammering from abuse victim groups and opposition parties.
Comparisons are being made with similar speedy and effective judicial investigations in Canada, Queensland and Britain.
The mess has embroiled church and state and the legal profession. Thousands of Irish people around the world are wondering if their claims of physical, emotional and sexual abuse will ever end up being probed, as had been promised.
Not matter what happens the abuse issue is now a four-pronged juggernaut that is going to soak up millions.
While it prepares its response, the government hasn’t published Laffoy’s resignation letter and attachments. A leaked copy in the Sunday Tribune shows that it details her complaints about delays in getting cooperation and how a range of factors over which it had no control had “together produced a real and pervasive sense of powerlessness.”
She details behind-the-scenes rows about finances, staffing, legal costs and says that to abide with the minister’s radical review “would be a complete abrogation of the independence” that the Oireachtas intended for the commission and would “seriously undermine” her credibility.
Before the current crux, the Christian Brothers have launched a High Court challenge to the commission naming dead members of the order who are found to be abusers. The outcome is almost certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court and that will cause further delays.
Dempsey claimed an unchanged commission could take eight to 11 years to complete its work and have to pay