So why should the world care about institutionalised child abuse in Ireland? Because it was widespread, systematic and endemic and woven into the very fabric of an authoritarian religious culture. This wasn’t a case of a few bad apples. The Church was the bad apple.
The following is the text of a letter to the Editor which I have submitted to Irish Newspapers.
There have been many expressions of shock at the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse which found that physical and sexual abuse of children was widespread, systematic and endemic. But are we really surprised? Can anyone from the Department of Education down to the Catholic Bishops, religious superiors, inspectors, teachers, care workers, doctors and nurses who came in contact with the system claim ignorance of what was actually going on?
Many a child of my era was threatened with the reform school if we did not behave. We had our own Gulag Archipelago on our own doorstep and did nothing about it because of a slavish adherence to a religious dictatorship.
But the Government priority now, as articulated by our Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, is to prevent anyone speaking ill of the religious by bringing in a new criminal offence of blasphemous libel. We need not only to dismiss this ridiculous suggestion and those who propose it, but the Constitutional provision which they claim requires it.
If we put half as much effort into debating a Constitutional amendment to protect the rights of children as we have with the Lisbon Treaty, there is no reason why both referenda can’t be held this October.
Indeed the Lisbon Treaty, if ratified, would give legal effect to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union which includes specific provisions for the the rights of children to be protected and cared for; to express their views freely; for their views to be taken into account; to maintain contact with their parents; and to have their best interests be the primary consideration in all actions taken in relation to them.
It would be appropriate that a Referendum on a Treaty which gives legal effect to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union should also be accompanied by a constitutional amendment protecting the human rights of our children and getting rid of the archaic constitutional protection of religious rights not to be offended by others.
We have had enough of the apologies of the perpetrators of child abuse and those who protected them, and moral outrage only gets you so far. It is time we had some real action, and we cannot trust those who have ruled this country for so long to provide it. The message to all parties at the forthcoming elections must be – we want constitutional action on this now, or you will not be given a second chance.
To provide some context for the letter, I include a quote from an Irish Times report today…
Systematic, endemic abuse in State institutions laid bare – The Irish Times – Thu, May 21, 2009
THOUSANDS OF children suffered physical and sexual abuse over several decades in residential institutions run by religious congregations, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has found.
The report published yesterday describes how children lived in “a climate of fear” in the institutions and finds that “sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions”. Cases of sexual abuse were hidden by the congregations that ran the institutions and offenders were transferred to other locations where they were free to abuse again, the report says.
The commission, which was chaired by Mr Justice Seán Ryan, heard from more than 500 witnesses who said they had been sexually abused.There were also many reports of injuries, including broken bones, lacerations and bruising.
Eight chapters in the report are devoted to the Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys in the State. More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than all other male orders combined.
The report sharply criticises the Department of Education for failing to carry out proper inspections. “The deferential and submissive attitude of the Department of Education towards the congregations compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection,” the report says. The commission, which was set up in 1999, investigated industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages, institutions for children with disabilities and ordinary day schools. It heard evidence covering the period from 1914 to the present but the bulk of its work addressed the period from the early 1930s to the early 1970s.
More than 1,700 men and women gave evidence of the abuse they suffered as children in institutions, with over half reporting sexual abuse. Accounts of abuse given in relation to 216 institutions are detailed in the report, which runs to nearly 3,000 pages.
More than 800 priests, brothers, nuns and lay people were implicated. The final cost of the commission may be over €100 million.
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The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is separate from the Residential Institutions Redress Board, which has received some 15,000 applications. It is expected the total cost of awards by the board will exceed €1 billion, of which €128 million has been contributed by 18 religious congregations.
Of course the usual apologies have been issued by the perpetrators, who also blocked and frustrated the work of the Commission for as long as they could. Many of the allegedly non-existent files which form the basis of much of the report were eventually found in the Vatican. We have had enough of such apologies. It is time for real concerted action.
One of the key issues which needs to be addressed is that the authoritarian structures of the Church intrinsically predisposed it to the abusive relationships which were so widespread, systematic and endemic in its ranks. This wasn’t a case of “a few bad apples”. A religious sensibility which claims power over what others may say or do is itself intrinsically rotten to the core. The Church has been the bad apple in our society, and no amount of good it may have done in other spheres can disguise that fact.
The democratic guarantee of religious freedom must also include the right to be free of religion. And that means we must be free to speak freely about religion. Getting rid of the Blasphemy provision in our Constitution is therefore a key part of getting rid of that authoritarian mindset. It is also a central part of developing a tolerant and democratic political ethos throughout the EU.
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My drive in life is certainly determined by my Catholic faith. In previous generation, members of my family were part of religious orders. For anyone to harm a child’s innocence is a most grievous crime and must be prosecuted by the state. Abuse of children continues today on a global scale, awareness must be raised. It’s not just the religious who harm children, but also sport trainers and school phys ed teachers who prey on children. Even in the Netherlands, the Labor Party tried to pass a law permitting sex between adults and young teenagers in the early nineties. Unbelievable.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."child abuse includes culturally sanctioned “marriage”. Horrific!
What made the Irish situation so horrific was the scale, the systematic nature of it, and the way it was tolerated and covered up by the Church authorities.
We all accept that their is sin, crime, misbehaviour etc. What matters is how the authorities deal with it when it is uncovered.
The whole legitimacy of the Church is challenged when its most senior prelates cover this sort of thing up.
If the Church doesn’t follow Christ it had better shut up shop. ” For those who would harm these little ones, it were better that they had a millstone tied around their necks”…. or words to that effect.
and were sheltered here? Or how many of those abusers named were abusing kids in the US and were sent home to Ireland because of it?
The report is nearly 3000 pages long and I don’t know if it itemises where all the abusers ended up. There have been a few cases of abusers being “exported” to the US to avoid justice at home, but what is generally remarkable is the alacrity of the process. An abuser “dismissed” at one institution had little difficulty getting a job at another not necessarilly very far away, and many where moved on several times by the religious authorities with little more than an injunction not to sin again. The civil authorities rarely got involved.
Actually, a lot of the molester-priests were shipped off to Australia. And not surprisingly we have a similar history of children being abused. As in Ireland, wards of the state were frequently handed over to Catholic institutions for their care. The adult survivors are still pressing for a full-inquiry.
If you haven’t already, and have the stomach for such things, I highly recommend watching the movie The Magdalene Sisters.
I was just coming here to mention that story.
Googling “The Magdalene Laundries” turns up similar links, such as this CBS News story from 2003:
The Magdalene compounds were compared to prisons, but they were actually worse, as prisoners at least had the right to protest their confinement. Instead, the compounds were forced-labor camps, where the nuns and priests running them profited from the labor of the young women the Church had demonized.
Sometimes they only sin the inmates had committed was the sin of being poor or from a family which was too poor to care for them…
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Finnegan posits that although the Good Shepherd magdalen asylums had their roots in both the Victorian rescue movement and implementation of the Contagious Diseases Acts, their function changed over time. The Victorian notion of rescue dictated that women enter an asylum for a period of reform, but ultimately they would return to the “real world” as respectable citizens. But the Good Shepherds insisted on long-term committals, in some cases for life, which both defeated the purpose of reform and limited the number of women who could be rescued. Prostitutes were unwilling to submit themselves for extended periods of time, and by the end of the nineteenth century very few of the women who entered the Good Shepherd asylums were, in fact, prostitutes. Finnegan further posits that conditions in the asylums were so bad that prostitutes increasingly refused to enter them. As the admission of prostitutes decreased, the Sisters began to broaden their category of “fallen” women to include unmarried mothers, girls in danger of “falling”, and girls in need of “protection”. Finnegan also notes that many women were classified in the admission registers as “feeble-minded”, suggesting that their prospects for self-sufficiency in the real world were limited.
The Good Shepherd Convent Asylum – Cork
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."joni mitchell penned a song back in 1994±, called the magdalene laundries…
it originally appeared on her album Turbulent Indigo, 1994, which, btw, earned a grammy award.
there’s something fundamentally flawed, and inherently foreign to what their professed beliefs are, that seems to be deeply embedded in the concept of control and debasement of lessers that seems to be imbedded in all religions. although christians, and the catholics in particular, do seem to have been extraordinarily prone to it throughout history…see the not too distant sexual abuse scandals here in the u.s., the inquisitions…it’s rather a long list.
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Distortion of sexuality. Power and control is the basics of abuse in general and between partners in marriage.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."with all due respect oui, l don’t see the connection between lack of empathy or cognitive distortions at work in these cases.
imo, it seems that the dictates, and subsequent powers , that are endowed to the ‘keepers’ of various and sundry religious orders…priests, nun, popes, pastors, imams, lamas, etc… and reinforced by the teachings and rites thereof, leads to a sort of yin/yang relationship between them and their ‘flock’ that’s more akin to an institutionalized form of sadomasochism. ergo, it may attract a specific personality type that harbours a need to both suffer and inflict pain. one need not search too hard into the history of any organized religion for examples of deviant behaviour, or secrecy surrounding it, be it cover ups or ritual in nature.
btw, l long ago rejected any associations with organized religion, of any persuasion. for whatever that’s worth.
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about the horrific details of the abuse. It’s medieval. When I emigrated with my parents to the US in 1957, I found the spirit of parish priests and missionaries refreshing. In the Netherlands there were many issues which distracted from primary Christian values. I personally have never experienced anything but schools and teachers with tremendous personal drive and sacrifice to do good. Today’s conservative bishops in the States have chosen for might instead of benevolence and understanding of hardship in society.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Yea – I’ve seen it. But in this case the abuse was more physical and related to adults. The Commission is reporting on child abuse, much of it of a sexual nature.
I didn’t mean to imply that they were equivalents, only that watching the movie “The Magdalene Sisters” provides additional insight to the kind of abuses that inevitably arise from all-powerful institutions – and in this case the same institution: the Irish Catholic Church.
No more excuses, just protect our children – Letters, Opinion – Independent.ie
The Independent is Ireland’s largest circulation daily newspaper.
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(OpEd – New York Times) – Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.
Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.
We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."A very powerful piece by a distinguished novelist… Thanks for the link