Endemic Sexual Abuse in State institutions in Ireland

[Neil]

What would you call this?

Harsh parenting.  They should suck it up.

[Malthus]

You guys are hilarious. 

As for the abuse - it sounds truly horrible.

[Valmy]

So Church institutions were pretty much above the law eh?

It sounds almost medieval, the old idea that somehow religion alone could make people behave.  'Nobody who speaks Latin could be evil.'

[Viking]

So Church institutions were pretty much above the law eh?

It sounds almost medieval, the old idea that somehow religion alone could make people behave.  'Nobody who speaks Latin could be evil.'

"Good people will do good things, evil people will do evil things but it takes religion to make good people do evil things,"

[ulmont]

"Good people will do good things, evil people will do evil things but it takes religion to make good people do evil things,"

Really, he's selling nationalism (and dedication to any cause, really) short there.

[Viking]

"Good people will do good things, evil people will do evil things but it takes religion to make good people do evil things,"

Really, he's selling nationalism (and dedication to any cause, really) short there.

[Hitchins]Nazism and Communism were and are quasi religious ideologies[/Hitchins]

Hitchins operating definition of Religion is probably more along the lines of "any organized subservience of reason, logic or science to dogma" rather than any religious person's definition of Religion.

[Siege]

Can you imagine how it was in the middle ages?

[garbon]

Can you imagine how it was in the middle ages?

You could just tell us about your life as a child.

[The Brain]

Can you imagine how it was in the middle ages?

Give me a few years and I'll be there.

[Cerr]

Here's another good article about the scandal:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0521/1224247036973.html

OPINION: IT IS quite simply a devastating report. It is a monument to the shameful nature of Irish society throughout most of the decades of the 20th century, and arguably even today, writes MARY RAFTERY

Mr Justice Seán Ryan and the child abuse commission have produced a work of incalculable value to this country. They have painstakingly charted the vast scale of abuse of tens of thousands of children within institutions. Crucially, they have ascribed responsibility for that abuse by examining the role and reactions of the authorities concerned – the twin pillars of church and State which colluded so disastrously in the misery of so many children.

Irish society has a long record of running away from the appalling truth of the physical and sexual torture experienced by so many children across over 100 childcare institutions. Many have found a myriad of ways to remain in denial.

Just a few bad apples, they say. And it’s all in the past anyway. Most disgraceful have been the snide suggestions that those revealing their abuse are motivated by compensation rather than the truth. These are the excuses which have been peddled by the religious orders, most notably the Christian Brothers, over the decades. The Ryan commission report makes clear that it has been a deliberate strategy by this and other orders to deny, to obfuscate and to challenge any and all of the allegations against them. What is so important is that it is not merely a historic failing on their part – it remains their approach to this day. Only a single religious order is singled out as having a more open and accepting approach to both the inquiry process and to the victims themselves – this is the Institute of Charity, known as the Rosminian order, who ran viciously abusive schools at Ferryhouse in Clonmel and Upton in Cork and who now seek to understand how their ideals could have become so debased.

While some of the other religious orders, and indeed the State, have made public apologies, these are of highly questionable value in the face of the continuing attempts by both church and State to evade responsibility and intimidate victims.

The Ryan report is particularly interesting on this particular form of hypocrisy. On the public apology by the Christian Brothers, it says it was “guarded, conditional and unclear”, and that “it was not even clear that the statement could properly be called an apology”.

Crucially, the abject failure by most of the congregations to accept any responsibility for the abuse has been identified repeatedly by the commission. In this respect, its findings are targeted directly at the current leadership within these organisations. Again in the case of the Christian Brothers, the report draws a pointed distinction between the evidence of contrition given by many individual Brothers who had worked in the industrial schools, and the attitude of blanket denial coming from those who are currently in charge of the congregation.

The commission describes a range of problems encountered when dealing with the Christian Brothers: assertions “known to be incorrect or misleading”; relevant facts omitted; and a policy of denying that a Brother was ever in an institution where “a complainant had got a name even slightly wrong”.

It should be remembered that many of the religious congregations implicated in the abuse continue to run hundreds of primary and secondary schools across Ireland today.

The Christian Brothers remain the largest provider of schools for boys, while the Sisters of Mercy provide the same facility for girls. Another savagely abusive congregation – the Brothers of Charity, whose abuse of mentally handicapped boys is catalogued in the report’s chapter on its institution at Lota in Cork – continues today to be the largest provider of care facilities for both adults and children with intellectual disabilities.

This asks important questions of us as a society: are we simply to sweep this under the carpet, to conveniently agree that everything is much better today? Or should we instead look to change a system where so much of the educational and care provision for our children is farmed out to organisations who are unaccountable and now proven to have a long track record of abuse and cover-up?

And what of the State and the Department of Education? They too stand condemned for their abject and grotesque failures to protect the children in their care. Grossly inadequate inspection and regulation, combined with wilfully turning a blind eye when complaints were made are detailed repeatedly in the commission’s report.

And again, we perceive a pattern where this is no mere failing of a past era. We know that the Department of Education is currently fighting child sex abuse victims in the courts to ensure that the State is declared to have no legal responsibility for what happened to them. The State has even gone so far as to threaten victims that it will force them to pay its own legal costs (as well as theirs) should they continue to attempt to hold the State to account. This kind of bullying, threatening behaviour is redolent of the attitudes which the Ryan commission report describes as pervasive in the 1940s and 1950s. Nonetheless, hundreds of victims of child sexual abuse by day-school teachers continue today to experience what can fairly be described as a campaign of State-sponsored intimidation in their attempts to seek justice in the courts.

We have heard all about the ordeal of Louise O’Keeffe, terrified that she might lose her house to pay the State’s legal bills on foot of her case against the Department of Education over sexual abuse by her school principal, which she suffered at the age of eight.

A number of cases concerning another primary school teacher, the notorious former Christian Brother Donal Dunne, are similarly being fought by the State. This sexual predator is the subject of an entire chapter in the Ryan commission report, which also included day-school abuse within its remit.

It is an account of staggering negligence on the part of every single element of the educational system involved. Dunne (referred to as John Brander in the report) moved blithely from school to school across the midlands, sexually assaulting children in each of them, despite detailed knowledge at senior government and Catholic Church levels that he was a paedophile.

It should be pointed out that the report has some failings, most particularly the decision not even to name perpetrators of abuse who have been criminally convicted. It is difficult to fathom the rationale for this, and it is likely to lead to a certain understandable frustration from victims.

Further, the report’s recommendations are disappointingly vague and brief, and do not do justice to the meticulous attention to detail and the plain, frank language of the main body of the report.

In particular, there are two key issues which are not addressed. In the face of such an avalanche of abuse of highly vulnerable children, the question of a specific constitutional provision for the protection of the rights of children should become central to any debate flowing from this report. It is painfully clear that the general protections for children as part of a family unit were pitifully inadequate to save these tens of thousands of children from abuse in times past, and seem similarly incapable today. A recommendation in this area would have been helpful.

Secondly, there is the issue of mandatory reporting of child abuse. This has been a highly controversial area, with strenuous opposition from various professional groups responsible for child welfare. A White Paper on the issue, promised by the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern when he made his historic apology to child abuse victims in 1999, failed to materialise. It remains up to any individual as to whether information about a child at risk is passed on to the appropriate authorities.

The Ryan report is a testament to what happens when discretion prevails. While there has undoubtedly been enormous progress in child protection mechanisms since the days of the industrial schools, we do know that children at risk continue to be let down by the State, remaining in abusive conditions without protection. At the very least, it would have been useful for the child abuse commission to have again raised the reporting issue for debate.

However, what the Ryan commission report has done with great thoroughness is to give us a compelling vision of the hell to which so many children were consigned. It is up to ourselves as a society to demand from Government a series of guarantees, constitutional in part, to ensure that it is never again repeated.

Mary Raftery is a freelance journalist who has written extensively about how children were abused while under the care of both the Catholic Church and the State

[Neil]

Is it really a scandal?  After all, it's not like nobody knew that the Catholic Church was full of Martinuses for years now.

[Cerr]

It'll be interesting to see if this does much damage to the church worldwide.

Here's a piece from a British Catholic:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/21/catholic-abuse-ireland-ryan

An abuse too far by the Catholic church

Tales of systematic abuse in Irish Catholic institutions leave me wondering how long I can continue to feel part of this church

Madeleine Bunting
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 May 2009 16.31 BST
Article history

This could not be worse. The Ryan report is the stuff of nightmares. It's the adjectives which chill: systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary, endemic. They pretty much tell the whole story of the violence and sexual abuse suffered by a generation of some of the most vulnerable children in Ireland over several decades of the middle of the 20th century. This is a crisis for Ireland – Irish bloggers yesterday were describing the scandal as their equivalent of the Holocaust – but it is also a crisis for global Catholicism. After all, it is not just Ireland going through this terrible reckoning with its Catholic history but the US, Australia and to some extent the UK.

The Ryan report's meticulous gathering of evidence over several volumes paints a picture of a system of church and state in Ireland which was horrifically dysfunctional with its combination of sadism and deference. Page after page punches the point home with relentless clarity. Squarely in the frame are the religious orders who systematically protected and tolerated their members' actions even when they knew they were breaking the law. But also culpable is the state charged to inspect the childrens' homes and schools. It was too deferential to the Catholic church to ever do the job properly.

When child abuse in the Catholic church first began to be taken seriously in the late 80s/early 90s, the line of argument reluctantly conceded after straight denial became impossible to sustain, was that it was all about a "few bad apples". But the Ryan report destroys this fig leaf of a defence because of the sheer scale of what went on. The report rightly challenges the relevant religious orders to "examine how their ideals became debased" and why it was that they consistently put the interests of their institutions before individuals.

The report is so damning, not just in dealing with the past, but on how it calls up short present behaviour – the lamentable reluctance of the religious orders to engage with the inquiry or fully accept their role. The report argues that the public apology by the Christian Brothers was "guarded, conditional and unclear", and that "it was not even clear that the statement could properly be called an apology".

The Irish government has officially apologised and is footing the lion's share of the bill for compensation to victims. The Ryan report calls for a national memorial. There is growing pressure for some commensurate gesture of atonement from the Catholic church. The apologies flooding out yesterday seem too little, too late. And there is still, extraordinarily, denial – ranging from Mary Kenny's jaunty variety of "I've never met a priest who is a paedophile" to the new Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who praised the courage of the religious orders concerned and seemed to exonerate their reluctance to face the past as "instinctive and quite natural". It's a form of wording which, from such an experienced media operator as Nichols, beggars belief.

There needs to be a far more probing analysis of the structure of authority within the Catholic church, and the culture of deference and obedience expected of lay people towards priests. These bred a preoccupation with maintaining the prestige and authority of church institutions; any threat to that priority – regardless of the cost to the welfare of individuals - had to be stifled. These are the characteristics which have made the Catholic church morally bankrupt.

As one Jesuit-edited blog put it this week:

Why did so many Catholic institutions fail so appallingly? A hundred reasons can be suggested, but three come to mind: undue respect for authority (which was self-justifying and rarely self-critical); religious authoritarianism (government of communities by self-perpetuating cliques, who rarely saw the need for fresh thinking); and a rancid clericalism (product of a religious culture that increasingly turned in on itself).

How can this cosiness by shaken up, challenged and reformed? This is not a new debate within the Catholic church; ever since the second Vatican council in the early 1960s there have been a minority who believed that the hierarchy of the church owed more to the Roman Empire than it did to the Jewish carpenter, and have sought measures of reform. But their efforts have met with so little success that they have retreated to the margins faced with a resurgent conservatism. Many others have given up the fight, and abandoned Catholicism altogether as too irredeemably unreformable.

The whole sorry chapter raises a very private dilemma. For years now, I've had an intermittent conversation with an admirable and devout relative: How long can we hang on? When do our fingernails break? Belonging to any institution involves sometimes having to clamp a clothes peg on your nose, as my colleague Polly Toynbee urged in the very different circumstances of disaffected voters sticking with Labour in 2005. But there comes a point when the clothes peg option runs out, the fingernails break.

The Catholic church is one of the world's most enduring institutions: no other global body counts more than a billion adherents whose practices and behaviours are guided by an organised, disciplined hierarchy, but this whole awful history of abuse is a reminder that too often in history that institutional survival has come at the cost of everything it purports to believe.

[jimmy olsen]

Can you imagine how it was in the middle ages?

You could just tell us about your life as a child.

Nice one

[DGuller]

Can you imagine how it was in the middle ages?

You could just tell us about your life as a child.

[Valmy]

Why did so many Catholic institutions fail so appallingly? A hundred reasons can be suggested, but three come to mind: undue respect for authority (which was self-justifying and rarely self-critical); religious authoritarianism (government of communities by self-perpetuating cliques, who rarely saw the need for fresh thinking); and a rancid clericalism (product of a religious culture that increasingly turned in on itself).

So they were just following orders?