TWELVE members of the secretive Residential
Institutions Redress Board shared fees of €1.627m last year, the Sunday Tribune can reveal.

Each of the 12 board members took home an average of €135,583 last year for listening to the horrific stories of abuse suffered by former residents of care homes and industrials schools.

Despite receiving more than €100,000 each in the space of a year, the board members have approved settlements of an average of just €65,000 to victims since the scheme's inception.

Precise figures regarding which of the 12 members earned how much are not made available by the board, which does not respond to media inquiries.

A separate request under the Freedom of Information Act to the Department of Education, which funds the board, was also met with a refusal for further detail.

They said: "The Residential Institutions Redress Board is an independent body established under the Residential Institutions Redress Act 2002 to make awards to persons who as children were resident in certain institutions in the state and who have or have had injuries that are consistent with abuse received while so resident.

"The department acts solely as a paying agent in respect of the board."

Regardless, figures compiled by the Sunday Tribune show that members of the Residential Institutions Redress Board have shared €5.5m between them since 2003.

The cost of legal fees also continued to spiral out of control with €95m paid to legal firms for their work in taking thousands of cases.

One firm, Byrne, Carolan, Cunningham, earned more than €2.3m in 2007 representing a total of 199 clients during the year. Another firm, Hodge, Jones & Allen, earned a similar sum in legal fees last year for representing a total of 227 people.