On 11th October 2024 Simon Harris said that he would “legislate” to make religious orders pay redress to victims of sexual abuse in church-run schools. This was a blatant election-time lie. In truth, he and his government will do nothing. Don’t doubt it for a moment. Fine Gael will never threaten the property rights of the churches or lift a finger to remove them from schools.
Making the church pay would require decisive action. Despite Harris’s clumsy, pathetic attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the electorate, we know that only socialists are prepared to take that action. For example, applying Compulsory Purchase Orders is a must. The Catholic church in Ireland has wealth of €12 billion and 10,700 properties. They’re not going to give that up voluntarily. Harris was actually asked if he would seek to apply Compulsory Purchase Orders but he started waffling on about “levers” at his disposal and wanting to avoid “adversarial language” [[1]](https://www.thejournal.ie/simon-harris-religious-orders-redress-6485142-Sep2024/).
With an adversary like Simon Harris, the religious orders don’t need friends. His hamfisted attempt to talk tough creates an illusion of action that is extremely damaging because it creates a belief that something is being done when it is not.
This spin protects the churches and insults the victims and survivors.
A history of state collusion with the churches
This is nothing new: time and again, the state has actively protected the religious orders from the consequences of their actions. We know that Simon Harris will do nothing to take on the churches because he, and previous Fine Gael & Fianna Fáil – led governments, have done less than nothing to date:
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The scandalous 2002 Woods deal that limited the liability of 18 religious orders to £100/€127 million has resulted in wholesale robbery from the public purse. The state has picked up 84% of the €1.5 Billion compensation bill for victims of abuse in Church-run Institutions.
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The religious orders have resisted, deflected, refused to pay redress to survivors of Magdalene Laundries. So far, they have paid absolutely nothing. Just two of the four orders who ran the Magdalene slave-labour laundries – the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of Mercy – have wealth of €450 Billion and €650 billion respectively.
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Not a cent of the €850 million available for survivors of Mother and Baby Homes has come from the religious orders and the state has acted disgracefully in how it has excluded 24,000 survivors from redress.
We must make them pay for once and for all, for the abuses they carried out against women and children in the various Catholic – and Protestant – institutions that operated in Ireland until very recently. Report after report shows that women and children were abused, beaten, neglected, imprisoned in, abducted into, experimented on, and died like flies in various institutions run by religious orders.
Industrial homes, Magdalene laundries, Mother and Baby homes no longer operate but their effects live on in the trauma experienced by survivors and in the intergenerational effects that blight the lives of countless thousands of people.
The fact that religious orders still manage schools is unacceptable. The latest Commission of Investigation announced by Minister Foley will turn its attention to the 2,400 cases of abuse in 308 schools revealed by the Scoping Inquiry, but this is the same old response from the state: set up a commission to delay and provide cover, wait for the next item in the news cycle to appear, and keep to the line of least resistance by avoiding a confrontation with the churches.
Enough spin. We need a real campaign. If we have to travel from place to place, visiting religious orders one by one then we should do it. We need to shame and terrify them as they once shamed and terrified the women and children of Ireland.
It is time to Make them pay once and for all.
Remember: Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, the Greens will never make the churches pay. If you want tears in the Dáil, an “apology” and election time catfishing, they’ll give you those, but that’s all they’ll give you. Only socialists understand what is needed and are prepared to do what is needed.