We've been hearing stories of abuse in Ireland for so long that it's easy to get inured to it all. And even now, with all the appalling evidence out in the open, there'll be no prosecutions:
Victims of child abuse at Catholic institutions in the Irish Republic have expressed anger that a damning report will not bring about prosecutions.
The report, nine years in the making and covering a period of six decades, found thousands of boys and girls were terrorised by priests and nuns.
Government inspectors failed to stop beatings, rapes and humiliation.
John Walsh, of Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, said he felt "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions.
The findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions - in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report.
No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document....The five-volume study concluded that church officials encouraged ritual beatings and consistently shielded their orders' paedophiles from arrest amid a "culture of self-serving secrecy"
The commission found that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions, and church leaders knew what was going on.
It also found physical and emotional abuse and neglect were rife in some institutions.
Schools were run "in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff".
It found the Department of Education had generally dismissed or ignored complaints of child sexual abuse and dealt inadequately with them.
As far back as the 1940s, school inspectors reported broken bones and malnourished children but no action was taken.
The report proposed 21 ways the Irish government could recognise past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counselling and education to victims, and improving current child protection services.
But not including prosecution of the perpetrators...
What I hadn't quite appreciated until this latest report, apart from the sheer relentless barbarity of it all, was that this didn't apply just to orphans:
Patrick Walsh was two years old when he was taken to court with his two brothers aged three and four, and a sister of six months. The crime: their mother was in an unhappy marriage and had left her husband.
“She was viewed as the guilty party by Church and State,” Mr Walsh said. “My father denounced her because she wanted a divorce, which was illegal. We were put in the dock, charged and sentenced for ‘having a parent who does not exercise proper guardianship’.” With that decision Mr Walsh lost his childhood. His memories of the next 14 years are of physical and sexual assault, hunger, fear and privation at the Artane Boys’ School near Dublin run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers, a Catholic organisation.
“They were men of real violence. When I arrived in Artane in 1963 there were 450 boys and it had a stench of violence about it. The home was also used as a detention centre for young offenders, so we were preyed upon not just by the Brothers but by feral gangs.”
He said that he was also sexually abused twice by a specific Christian Brother. His mother’s repeated efforts to free her children were unjustly refused by the authorities. “For years we wouldn’t believe that she had tried to get us out but she made numerous attempts and was told it was impossible. She had to go back to her husband if she wanted her children.”
Throughout his incarceration in Ireland he saw his mother only once...
Mr Walsh, 53, described the system that abused him as a marriage of convenience between Church and State. “Ireland was a theocratic state. The Church received grants which were the lifeblood of the religious orders and the children were used as the means to fill their pockets with cash. I learnt in later years that Artane would get a cheque, say for £10,000, every month from the Government.“
Artane would send £8,000 to Rome. As a consequence we were badly fed and we worked 12-hour days in the fields and workshops. I was put to work in the shoe shop. Hunger was a constant companion. We were child slaves.”
It kind of puts into context some of the hard-line Protestantism you see over the border in Ulster.
Comments