Endemic Sexual Abuse in State institutions in Ireland

[Cerr]

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE54J4GV20090520?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&sp=true

Irish priests beat, raped children: report
By Padraic Halpin and Carmel Crimmins

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Priests beat and raped children during decades of abuse in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland, an official report said on Wednesday, but it stopped short of naming the perpetrators.

Orphanages and industrial schools in 20th century Ireland were places of fear, neglect and endemic sexual abuse, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse said in a harrowing five-volume report that took nine years to compile.

The Commission, chaired by a High Court judge, blasted successive generations of priests, nuns and Christian Brothers -- a Catholic religious order -- for beating, starving and, in some cases raping, children in Ireland's now defunct network of industrial and reformatory schools from the 1930s onwards.

"When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again," the report said.

"Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from."

The report slammed the Department of Education for its failure to stop the crimes. In rare cases when it was informed of sexual abuse, "it colluded in the silence," the report said.

Successful legal action by the Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys in the country, led the Commission to drop its original intention to name the people against whom the allegations were made.

No abusers will be prosecuted as a result of the inquiry.

John Kelly, coordinator of the Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA) group, said there could be no closure without accountability.

"I have been getting phone calls all day from former residents, they feel their wounds have been reopened for nothing," he told Reuters. "They were promised justice by the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 1999 and they feel cheated. They expected that the abusers would face prosecution."

UNDERWEAR INSPECTIONS

The Christian Brothers said they were appalled at the revelations but denied that their lawsuit had obstructed the report. "We are deeply sorry, deeply regretful for what has been put before us today," Brother Edmund Garvey said.

Many of the children were sent into church care because of school truancy, petty crime or because they were unmarried mothers or their offspring. Some were used as laborers, churning out rosary beads or set to work on farms.

Sexual abuse was endemic in boys' institutions and girls were preyed on by sexual predators who were able to operate unhindered.

The Commission interviewed 1,090 men and women who were housed in 216 institutions including children's homes, hospitals and schools. They told of scavenging for food from waste bins and animal feed, of floggings, scaldings and being held under water. There were underwear inspections and in one case, a boy was forced to lick excrement from a priest's shoe.

Absconders were flogged and some had their heads shaved.

Tom Sweeney, who spent five years at industrial schools including two years at the notorious Artane Industrial School, said it still haunted its former residents.

"Unfortunately there are a lot of people that have committed suicide, there are a lot of people that have ended up in hospitals and they have been forgotten about," he said.

Revelations of abuse, including a string of scandals involving priests molesting young boys, have eroded the Catholic Church's moral authority in Ireland, once one of the most religiously devout countries in the world.

The inquiry, conducted at a reported cost of 70 million euros ($95.16 million), was announced in 1999 by then Prime Minister Bertie Ahern after he apologized to victims following revelations made in a series of television documentaries.

The government has paid out around 825 million euros in compensation to former residents of the institutions and the final bill is likely to top 1 billion euros.

The report can be downloaded at:

http://www.childabusecommission.ie/index.html

Absolutely terrible stuff. Some church sexual abuse scandals had come out before but the scale of abuse is shocking.

The Catholic church has had far too much power in Ireland. The fact that the two main parties are both centre right conservative parties (both very sympathetic to the Catholic church) doesn't help things at all.
I hope this scandal will put people off the Catholic church and their political supporters.

[CountDeMoney]

Bah, toughens them up.

[Cerr]

By 'toughens them up', you mean deeply damages them for the rest of their lives and causes some of them to commit suicide?

[CountDeMoney]

By 'toughens them up', you mean damages them for the rest of their lives and causes some them to commit suicide?

Suicide culls the herd.  Whatever improves traffic in the morning.

Besides, Catholics are usually damaged for the rest of their lives anyway.  ZOMG MY DEAD GRANDMA KNOWS WHEN I MASTERBATE

[Neil]

By 'toughens them up', you mean deeply damages them for the rest of their lives and causes some of them to commit suicide?

Suck it up.  Priestly abuse has been going on for millenia.  Who are you to judge them?

[Queequeg]

Ireland:  All the alcoholism and barbarity of Russia, little of the innovation, grit or brilliance. 

[Valmy]

Ireland:  All the alcoholism and barbarity of Russia, little of the innovation, grit or brilliance. 

No innovation or brilliance among the Irish?  WTF?

It must be hard to suck all that Russian cock while smoking crack.

[The Brain]

Don't blame me. I have long supported burning away Popery with atomic fire. The Catholic Church needs to be destroyed utterly.

[citizen k]

It must be hard to suck all that Russian cock while smoking crack.

I would imagine it makes it more bearable. 

[Queequeg]

Ireland:  All the alcoholism and barbarity of Russia, little of the innovation, grit or brilliance. 

No innovation or brilliance among the Irish?  WTF?

It must be hard to suck all that Russian cock while smoking crack.

I'm not a huge fan of the Irish and I thought I might be able to get a rise out of CDM.

[Cerr]

Ireland:  All the alcoholism and barbarity of Russia, little of the innovation, grit or brilliance. 

No innovation or brilliance among the Irish?  WTF?

It must be hard to suck all that Russian cock while smoking crack.

I'm not a huge fan of the Irish

Well the feeling is mutual. Now piss off.

[Caliga]

 

The Irish are fine, as long as they're not Irish-Americans living in the Boston area.

(Who, you Euros will agree, are not really Irish anyway. )

[Cerr]

Here's a good editorial on the subject:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0521/1224247034262.html

The savage reality of our darkest days

THE REPORT of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is the map of an Irish hell. It defines the contours of a dark hinterland of the State, a parallel country whose existence we have long known but never fully acknowledged. It is a land of pain and shame, of savage cruelty and callous indifference.

The instinct to turn away from it, repelled by its profoundly unsettling ugliness, is almost irresistible. We owe it, though, to those who have suffered there to acknowledge from now on that it is an inescapable part of Irish reality. We have to deal with the now-established fact that, alongside the warmth and intimacy, the kindness and generosity of Irish life, there was, for most of the history of the State, a deliberately maintained structure of vile and vicious abuse.

Mr Justice Ryan’s report does not suggest that this abuse was as bad as most of us suspected. It shows that it was worse. It may indeed have been even worse than the report actually finds – there are indications that “the level of sexual abuse in boys’ institutions was much higher than was revealed by the records or could be discovered by this investigation”.

With a calm but relentless accumulation of facts, the report blows away all the denials and obfuscations, all the moral equivocations and evasions that we have heard from some of the religious orders and their apologists. The sheer scale and longevity of the torment inflicted on defenceless children – over 800 known abusers in over 200 institutions during a period of 35 years – should alone make it clear that it was not accidental or opportunistic but systematic.

Violence and neglect were not the result of underfunding – the large institutions, where the worst abuse was inflicted, were “well-resourced”. The failure of the religious orders to stop these crimes did not result from ignorance. The recidivist nature of child sexual abusers was understood by the Brothers, who nonetheless continued deliberately to place known offenders in charge of children, both in industrial schools and in ordinary primary schools. At best, this represented what the report calls “a callous disregard for the safety of children”. At worst, it was an active protection of, and thus collusion with, the perpetrators of appalling crimes.

Nor did the abuse continue because of secrecy. Again, the very scale of the violence made it impossible to keep it sealed off from either officialdom or society at large. Contemporary complaints were made to the Garda, to the Department of Education, to health boards, to priests and to members of the public. The department, “deferential and submissive” to the religious congregations, did not shout stop. Neither did anyone else. Indeed, perhaps the most shocking finding of the commission is that industrial school inmates were often sexually exploited by those outside the closed world of the congregations, by “volunteer workers, visitors, work placement employees, foster parents” and by those who took them out for holidays or to work.

The key to understanding these attitudes is surely to realise that abuse was not a failure of the system. It was the system. Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the poor, by acting as a threat. Without the horror of an institution like Letterfrack, it could not fulfil that function. Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through “successive generations of Brothers, priests and nuns”.

There is a nightmarish quality to this systemic malice, reminiscent of authoritarian regimes. We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead. We read of returned absconders having their heads shaved and of “ritualised” floggings in one institution.

We have to call this kind of abuse by its proper name – torture. We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour – young girls placed in charge of babies “on a 24-hour basis” or working under conditions of “great suffering” in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders – by its proper name: slavery. It demands a very painful adjustment of our notions of the nature of the State to accept that it helped to inflict torture and slavery on tens of thousands of children. In the light of the commission’s report, however, we can no longer take comfort in evasions.

* * *

Almost unbearable though it may be, it is important that everyone who can do so should read and absorb this report. We owe that especially to those victims who first broke the silence on the RTÉ documentaries Dear Daughter and States of Fear and to those who came forward to tell their stories to the commission. It is to be hoped that, in spite of the failure of the religious congregations to take full responsibility for what happened, those who have suffered have found some comfort in that process and in a report of such unflinching lucidity.

Most importantly, though, we owe it to all who are vulnerable in today’s Irish society. For their sakes, we need to know what happens when institutions acquire absolute power over defenceless people and when the State and society come to believe that it is better to collude in crimes than to challenge cherished beliefs. Mr Justice Ryan suggests the erection of a monument to the victims of abuse with the words of the State’s 1999 apology inscribed on it. That should happen, but the real monument will be that we inscribe on our collective consciousness as a society the two words “Never again”.

[Neil]

The Irish are fine, as long as they're not Irish-Americans living in the Boston area.

(Who, you Euros will agree, are not really Irish anyway. )

The Irish in Ireland are tainted by their treason.

And Cerr, your editorial is hillarious.  'TORTURE!  SLAVERY!  LOL!'

[Cerr]

The Irish are fine, as long as they're not Irish-Americans living in the Boston area.

(Who, you Euros will agree, are not really Irish anyway. )

The Irish in Ireland are tainted by their treason.

And Cerr, your editorial is hillarious.  'TORTURE!  SLAVERY!  LOL!'

What would you call this?

We read of children “flogged, kicked . . . scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead. We read of returned absconders having their heads shaved and of “ritualised” floggings in one institution.

or this?

We must also call the organised exploitation of unpaid child labour – young girls placed in charge of babies “on a 24-hour basis” or working under conditions of “great suffering” in the rosary bead industry; young boys doing work that gave them no training but made money for the religious orders – by its proper name: slavery