TEN YEARS is hell of a long time.You could only hope that, at the end of the 10 years, there would be a report that was fair to both sides.
If the judge had turned around and said things were not as bad as portrayed, people would have been very annoyed.
They would have said that guy who wrote 'The God Squad' was a bit over the top.
So the importance of yesterday was that the report was fair and told it like it was.
The people who are guilty of crimes should be pursued by the law and made answerable. But we are in a situation now where there may well be people guilty of gross abuse who will just walk away from this.
This was not some kind of competition to screw the religious orders. That is not what this was about. There is simply no winner in this.
The report shows the State was in complete collusion with the religious orders and abdicated its responsibilities for thousands of children. That is what the real issue is.
It should never be allowed to happen again. We cannot sit smugly and say 'well, that's the Ryan report' and abuse will never happen again.
We are going around using the word abuse. We use abuse as a kind of catch-all, but it does not explain what went on. I think we need to say exactly what the abuse was and be strong enough to come out and use that sort of language.
What happened in an awful lot of these schools is that people were actually raped. People were beaten up. People were seriously hurt, physically, mentally, emotionally. Some were damaged for life.
I wrote my book and nothing happened for years. A lot of people had great difficulty with it. But there's one thing about this report that will annoy me. That is people starting to say there is closure.
I hate the word closure. It is an overused word in social work fields. And now we have this report that says people were beaten up and starved, so that's it. But there's no closure.
People hearing the details of this report may well feel vindicated because the report acknowledges widespread abuse took place. Vindication is one thing. I can say I wrote 'The God Squad' 20 years ago. I could also say I told you then but it still took 20 years to set up the blasted commission.
I think the commission has made an effort but I'm not sure it went about it the right way. The whole thing should have been more confrontational to get to the bottom of what was going on.
There will be no prosecutions from this child abuse commission. The report cannot just say 'now you can get on with your life, you've had your go at the institution which abused you and raped you, you've had your day, now wrap it up and get on with your life'.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as that.
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