Dailymail - More than $400m of compensation to American victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests was paid with loans and guarantees from Allied Irish Bank, it has ben revealed.

The funds, in the form of loans, guarantees and lines of credit, were given specifically to pay clerical abuse victims, and led to AIB being dubbed the ‘Vatican’s banking arm’ in U.S. legal circles.

The revelation that a comparatively small Irish bank based on another continent was used to pay off victims will raise questions about AIB’s links to the church.

One of the payments, of $250m to the Los Angeles diocese, emerged in a new book entitled ‘Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church’, by Jason Berry, which outlines extraordinary links between the bank and the church.

Ultimately, because of this bank and the loans that it made out, the abuse of young kids was able to continue and not be scrutinized by the general public. Instead of handle the problem, they chose to fund it.

Teen victim: Esther Miller

Esther Miller was a teenager living in Los Angeles when she was repeatedly forced to commit sexual acts with a priest who went on to abuse other young girls.

That period in her life still haunts her as she enters her fifties.

The man who abused her – a young deacon still at seminary college – groomed her by getting close to her parents.

Over the course of two years, until she was 17, the priest forced himself on her. He was later appointed principal of a Catholic high school despite questions over his behaviour.

He told Esther to go to confession, but only to a particular priest. He called her evil. He later turned out to be a serial abuser of boys too.

She mentioned some details of the encounters to her mother, who slapped her and told her never to speak ill of the clergy.

The abuse had a profound effect on the next two decades of Esther’s life. She was married four times and had dozens of jobs.

Only after the revelations in the Boston diocese in 2002 did she set off on the long road to forcing the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to reveal what it knew. Esther’s case was one of hundreds, which were finally settled in mid 2007 for $660m.

‘I was surprised at the dollar amount. I had no idea of the insurance and other ways of raising money.’

And she had no idea until this week that Allied Irish Bank had helpfully stepped in with guarantees of hundreds of millions.

The deal allowed the Archdiocese to avoid going to court and opening all its documents to scrutiny.

But an investigation by the MoS has established that in a few short months in 2007 AIB emerged as the lender behind abuse settlements for four separate dioceses, and the true figure was almost twice as high.

It also emerges that while AIB was used to pay the bulk of the Church’s abuse claims, the dioceses were able to hold on to most of their properties.