ALLEGATIONS OF HISTORICAL abuse are often met with denial from potentially responsible organisations, which can contribute to a delay in meaningful investigation.
Where a number of allegations of abuses occur together, their volume suggests that abuse may have occurred in a widespread or systemic manner. The conventional legal system is typically best designed to address isolated criminal or civil offences and struggles, both substantively and procedurally, to respond to widespread or systemic harm.
It is in this context that a number of jurisdictions, including Ireland, have used public inquiries to address allegations of historical abuse or other widespread or systemic harms and wrongs.
A variety of inquiry models exist, from highly legalistic and formal tribunals of inquiry that operate in public, to commissions of investigation that have typically operated in private, to models of innovative justice, that draw from international human rights law or restorative justice.
Across the globe, different inquiries have gathered individual victim-survivor testimony, engaged in private and public hearings, developed systematic and thematic data about the past, identified individuals and groups responsible, and offer recommendations for further justice measures and policy changes.
Existing studies are ambivalent at best about whether inquiries can meet victim/survivor needs, and often offer risks of distress or re-traumatisation for those involved.
In Ireland, the use of public inquiries has typically adopted a more legalistic framing, guided primarily by the legal rights of accused persons, rather than the broader justice interests of victim-survivors.
As a result, victim-survivor led processes, that are informed by international best practices and guided by the risks of re-traumatisation involved in giving testimony about prior abuse, have typically not featured in Irish public life.
I have previously argued that “inquiries are best understood as raising expectations that the testimony of victim-survivors will be validated, acknowledged, and used to address historical abuses through other … justice mechanisms. If those expectations are not met, then inquiries represent a mere ritual contestation of power”.
To assess whether an inquiry can meet diverse victim-survivor needs, an inquiry design can be evaluated along a number of dimensions – the degree of survivor participation, its choice of of chair or commissioners, its legal powers to compel evidence, and whether its processes are informed by a range of disciplines including offering psychological support
and the breadth and scope of its mandate of investigation.
While at their best inquiries can offer important public acknowledgement of wrongdoing, this is often framed in social or historical terms, rather than in acknowledging duty holders and responsible actors, and the rights of victim-survivors that were breached.
Finally, inquiries are limited by design – they can offer recommendations if this forms part of their mandate, but further political will and pressure will be required for their
implementation and this will be a responsibility of government and the Minister responsible for the establishment of the inquiry.
As a result inquiries pursue ambitious goals, navigate contentious legal terrain and raise survivor expectations that their claims of wrongdoing and justice needs will be seen and vindicated.
Public inquiries are a key but risky means for validating survivor experiences and for such experiences to form the basis of other justice measures and public policy.
James Gallen is an associate professor in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University. His first monograph Transitional Justice and the Historical Abuses of Church and State was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023 and is available free as a gold open access title.
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