Why survivors of institutional child abuse feel let down by the body supposed to help them

Caranua is named after the Irish words for “new friend.” It was set up in 2014 to manage a fund of €110 million from religious orders, and distribute it in payments to institutional abuse survivors for their health, housing and education needs. It followed the publication of the Ryan Report in 2009, which then taoiseach Brian Cowen described as a “catalogue of horror and terror” visited upon children in the care of the state which was “appalling beyond belief.” 

Caranua expected to have collected all of the €110 million pledged by the religious orders by the end of 2018. Days away from Caranua’s planned closure, it is still missing just over €6 million from the Christian Brothers, which it needs to make payments to 1,062 survivors who had all applied for funding over a year ago. 

The Christian Brothers is one of 18 religious congregations which benefits from a controversial indemnity agreement with the government. The deal protected the religious orders from legal action from survivors in exchange for them promising to contribute €128 million between them. Compensation for institutional child abuse has so far cost the state over €1.4 billion. 

The current financial status of Caranua is beyond its control and is not the fund's fault. But as it prepares to wind down Caranua must itself be examined for the ways in which it may have failed survivors of institutional abuse.

Survivors and those advocating for them never really refer to the money they get from Caranua as “compensation,” because the concept of anyone ever being able to compensate these survivors for what happened to them is so unthinkable. Instead, many see the payments as ways to help their general wellbeing - help which the state owes them as a bare minimum.

On top of living with the long-term trauma of being abused as a child, survivors can sometimes have problems reading or writing. A number of them may have difficulties finding or keeping a job. Many have an enduring and understandable distrust of authority. 

Sometimes, Caranua worked perfectly and survivors were treated well and granted payments quickly. Often, it did not. 

Only survivors who received compensation through the Redress Board or the courts were allowed to apply to Caranua. This meant that it started off on a bad note: many survivors didn’t know about the Redress Board, and by the time they did know applications had closed. This month, an independent report on the experiences of abuse survivors published by the government said that this was seen as a further injustice and a sort of “double punishment”.

At one point, survivors were facing long waits between applying for funding and having it granted. If someone was looking for help covering the cost of a health procedure, they were often under pressure to get funding before their appointment date had come and gone.

The report commissioned by the government, and carried out by independent facilitators  Barbara Walshe and  Catherine O’Connell,  said that many survivors were “severely critical of Caranua” and said that its good intentions were completely mismatched with how the fund was actually run. 

“For survivors, who valued face to face contact and human interaction built slowly on trust, the bureaucratic nature of a statutory agency and its requirements acted as a lightning rod for many who had experienced the worst excesses of authority,” the report said. 

In the two years after Caranua first started operating, there were alarming signs that it was not managing the fund as well as it should have been. The comptroller and auditor general, the state’s spending watchdog, reported that there were signs of poor financial control in 2014 and 2015. 

In 2016, there were no receipts or invoices available in 40 per cent of cases where Caranua needed such proof before making a payment to a survivor, for example, a quote for planned work on a house.  The C&AG said that the agency had created a risk that the fund “might not have been used for the purposes intended.” 

By 2017, a Dáil committee was hearing evidence that two per cent of survivors who applied to Caranua had been awarded one fifth of the total fund. In two cases, Caranua had paid out €100,000 or more to two different people and three people were each awarded €90,000 or more. In another three cases, survivors were awarded between €80,000 and €85,000. The report said that some survivors felt that those who were better able to navigate the system got more out of Caranua at the start, while those who struggled with literacy and bureaucracy faced a “disempowering struggle.” 

In June 2016, Caranua decided to impose a €15,000 limit on how much each individual survivor could access from the fund to protect its “sustainability.” It had previously told survivors there “is no limit on the number of services that you can apply for and we encourage you to apply for everything that is relevant to you.” One survivor told the independent report that it felt as if “you couldn’t be trusted, and you were going to rip off the state.”

Under the 2012 law which set up Caranua, all of its administrative and operating costs also came from the €110 million fund. It emerged in 2017 that Caranua was planning to spend over €700,000 renting a new city centre office over three years, after it used some of the fund to redecorate the office it was about to leave. 

There were problems hiring and holding onto people to work for Caranua, and this led to €2 million of the redress fund being used on agency staff between 2014 and 2017.