The Irish government could face a bill of up to one billion euros (£700m) in compensation payouts to victims of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clerics, it emerged yesterday.
It had been thought that the compensation bill would total around €260m (£180m), but a report from Ireland's auditor general yesterday estimated there could be as many as 10,800 claims with average pay-outs of €96,000.
The new report prompted attacks from opposition parties against the Irish government's handling of the issue.
Last year the government struck a deal with the Catholic church to compensate thousands of victims for sexual and physical abuse they suffered while in children's homes run by religious orders.
The deal covered cases from the 1930s to the 1970s and the church agreed to contribute €128m, which was believed at the time to be around half the likely compensation bill. It was unclear last night if it would offer to pay more.
Responding to the auditor general's report, Pat Rabitte, leader of the opposition Labour party, said the government had "grossly mishandled" the compensation. He said: "This is proof, if proof were needed, that the government behaved in an entirely reckless and profligate manner in relation to this deal."
However, the prime minister, Bertie Ahern, insisted that the government had secured the best deal.
As part of last year's agreement the government agreed to indemnify the religious orders concerned against all future claims arising from past child abuse - in effect, leaving the Irish taxpayer to foot the bulk of the payouts.
The auditor general's report said a board set up by the government eight months ago to receive compensation claims had been receiving applications at a rate of 50 each week. The closing date for the applications is not for another two years.
Today, meanwhile, a campaign is due to be launched to get more of the victims of sexual abuse and ill-treatment in Irish orphanages and offenders' centres to come forward.
More than 150,000 children and teenagers passed through Irish residential institutions between the 1920s and 1980s and many suffered at the hands of the priests and nuns who ran them.
But so far fewer than 2,000 former victims of abuse - almost all of them living in the Irish Republic - have come forward to a redress board set up by the government.
Caroline Dolan, from the organisation Right of Place, who says she suffered at the hands of religious orders in Dublin, is leading a global search for people who, as children in Ireland, were ill-treated by the church.