ANGRY SCENES erupted at the Conrad Hotel yesterday as victims of child abuse and representative groups were barred from attending the press conference announcing the publication of the commission’s report. At one stage, gardaí were called as a crowd formed around the secretary of the commission while she attempted to explain that it was a press-only event and would not proceed unless they stepped away.
Inside the briefing Mr Justice Seán Ryan read a prepared statement and announced he would not be taking questions from reporters. “For all that the report tries to do, it does not try to balance what happened to children in institutions against what might have become of them if they had not been taken into care in the first place,” he said.
“When you take people into a State-regulated, statutory systems of care, whether it is right or wrong to subject them to such detention, you owe them a duty to take proper care of them and it cannot be an answer to a complaint about abuse or inadequate care that the people would have been worse off if you had not taken them in.”
Mr Justice Ryan said all parties had co-operated with the commission in its investigation but he singled out for praise the Rosminians, who operated industrial schools at Upton in Cork and Ferryhouse in Tipperary.
He said the Rosminian congregation not only accepted responsibility for the abuse that took place in their institutions but went further by seeking to understand it whereas other congregations tried to explain it.
At a separate press conference in a neighbouring suite, representatives from support groups expressed their outrage over the exclusion of victims from the commission’s briefing.
“I can’t imagine what the commission was thinking by barring people. I suspect they were fearful of the response of those who spent time in the institutions, but the effect of their actions was to further humiliate those who experienced abuse,” said One in Four’s chief executive Maeve Lewis .
John Kelly, co-ordinator of Soca (Survivors of Child Abuse), who was among those barred from the briefing, said he felt cheated by the report. “We were encouraged by this commission and by the former taoiseach to open our wounds. We did this and they’ve been left gaping open.”
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