The full horror of children’s lives that were destroyed by sexual, physical and emotional abuse meted out by Roman Catholic religious orders over decades in Ireland was laid bare today in an official five-volume report. A nine-year investigation by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse concluded that, although the sexual abuse of thousands of children who passed through Catholic-run institutions was widely known to be “endemic”, no action was taken to prevent it and the Irish Government colluded in a conspiracy of silence.
The report makes for relentlessly grim reading, chronicling the shocking conditions under which 35,000 children were held, many from infancy until reaching adulthood.
Cardinal Sean Brady, Ireland’s most senior cleric, said this evening: “I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions.”
The report’s publication had been delayed for several years after the Christian Brothers religious community sued successfully in 2004 to withhold from the report the names of all its members, dead or alive.
More than a thousand witnesses testified to abuse in 216 schools and residential institutions across Ireland between 1914 and 2000. More than 800 individuals were identified as physical or sexual abusers, an extraordinary number compared with the handful of prosecutions and convictions to have taken place so far. Ninety per cent of witnesses reported physical abuse while half of them reported sexual abuse.
The document states: “Acute and chronic contact and non-contact sexual abuse was reported, including vaginal and anal rape, molestation and voyeurism in both isolated cases and on a regular basis over long periods of time.”
Sexual abuse was carried out by religious and lay staff, co-residents and “professionals both within and external to the institutions” as well as by members of the public, volunteer workers, visitors and foster parents.
“Female witnesses in particular described, at times, being told they were responsible for the sexual abuse they experienced, by both their abuser and those to whom they disclosed abuse.”
The devastating 2,500-page document, which cost €70 million (£61 million) to compile, sparked anger even before it was published when some of the victims who turned up to the Dublin launch were refused entry. The commission, chaired by Justice Sean Ryan, called police and threatened to make arrests.
John Kelly, one of the victims, shouted: "This is a farce, it’s an absolute sham. Why are we being excluded? We were marginalised as children and you are doing the same to us again now!”
The commission found that the worst offender was the Christian Brothers order, which ran most of the institutions for older boys, while the Sisters of Mercy, which was supposed to care for girls, also came in for heavy criticism.
The report concluded that, while sexual abuse was endemic, it was impossible to determine its extent in boys’ schools because cases were “managed with a view to minimising the risk of public disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation".
It added: “A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.”
On the rare occasions that the Department of Education in Ireland, which had legal responsibility for the children, received complaints of sexual abuse, it “dealt inadequately” with them.
Hundreds of pages detail the horrors of life at specific institutions. One Brother told the commission about St Joseph’s Industrial School in Tralee, Co Kerry: “It was a secret enclosed world, run on fear.”
Glin Industrial School, Co Limerick, was where “Brothers with a known propensity for sexual abuse were transferred, indicating a serious indifference to the safety of children”.
A whole chapter is devoted to a Christian Brother given the pseudonym of John Brander which describes his “progress through six different schools where he physically terrorised and sexually abused children in his classroom”. The man's real name is Donal Dunne and he was convicted in 1999 of his crimes and given a two-year prison sentence.
The report says that his career, while shocking in itself, “illustrates the ease with which sexual predators could operate within the educational system of the State without fear of disclosure or sanction”.
Elsewhere it describes the practice of floggings at Daingean Reformatory School, Co Offaly, as “ritualised beatings which should not have been tolerated”.
At two residential schools for deaf girls, run by the Dominican Order of Nuns and the Daughters of the Cross of Liège, the report says that some girls “did experience sexual abuse at the hands of ’godfathers’ which they were unable to report or were disbelieved when they did report it”.
Some victims branded the report a “disgrace” for not giving them the opportunity to name and shame their tormentors, while a support group called it a record of “an absolutely shameful episode in Irish history". It added: "We should all hang our heads in shame.”
Torture, rape and beatings. That’s the unforgivable story of Roman Catholic Ireland in the 20th century. Still the perpetrators have not been named, and may never be brought to justice. It would be no exaggeration to call this a holocaust of abuse. Yet there will be no prosecutions for those perpetrators who are still alive, or naming of those who are dead. The Christian Brothers in 2004 won the legal right to anonymity for all those responsible.
The Christian Brothers, one of the most influential of the Church’s male religious orders, opened their first school in Ireland in 1802 and went on to run schools and residential homes for children in Canada, Australia and the UK.
In all countries, children suffered abuse at the hands of the brothers. In Ontario alone, the Christian Brothers paid out $23 million to 700 former students. In Ireland, where they educated many of the people at the top of the political Establishment, they took out newspaper advertisements apologising to victims of abuse. There has been a royal commission in Canada and convictions for sex crimes in Australia.
The anonymity of perpetrators is unlikely to be enough to save the Church from the effects of the widespread revulsion that will result from this report. If anything, the protection the Christian Brothers have managed to secure will merely add to the disgust.
Everyone will be asking, Catholic or not, how these superficially holy men and women could square their actions with their human conscience, never mind their Christian one.
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