Letterfrack reports show controlling mentality

By FINTAN O'TOOLE

The debate on institutional child abuse in Ireland has been distorted by a striking absence. Because the religious orders at the heart of the saga have refused to release their archives, it is almost impossible to understand the structures that engendered abuse in spite of the best intentions of many humane and selfless people.

This week, however, I have been able to read a tiny sliver of the hidden archives. I've had access to the so-called "visitation reports" for the Christian Brothers' industrial school in Letterfrack, Co Galway, from 1952 to 1973. These are the annual reports of the order's own "visitor", essentially an internal inspector from the provincial's office. They begin to sketch the outlines of the controlling mentality.

The reports throw up, for example, reminders that the Brothers themselves were closely watched and forbidden normal human contact with members of the opposite sex. The document for 1959, in its section on diet, notes: "I was told that Brothers N. and D. are frequently in the kitchen talking to the maids. I have told them that such a practice must end."

In 1970, the visitor reports that "two young, frivolous girls, constituting the kitchen staff, are not suitable. Superior says that one of them will be given notice to leave this week and that the other, the cook, will soon be dispensed with."

Another obvious feature is the way the institution acquired a financial stake in the survival of a brutal system. The financial health of Letterfrack depended on securing as many as possible of what the 1953 report calls "these children who mean so much financially to the institution".

The report for 1952 notes that the brother in charge of the farm "is ever on the outlook for boys in all the centres he travels to in securing stock and supplies. To his credit goes the goodly numbers that are generally maintained in the school."

The more inmates sent by the courts, the more profitable was the Letterfrack operation. In 1955, the Letterfrack visitation report complains that numbers had declined and were creeping up only gradually "owing to the fact that one of the Dublin judges sends convicted boys to the Cork industrial schools. He is a Corkman. This matter will require attention soon if the establishment here is to remain financially sound."

Declining numbers in the late 1950s seem to have led to operating deficits, but these would appear to have been reversed in the 1960s. The 1960 accounts showed "a surplus of 172 pounds". By 1969, Letterfrack had income of £19,131 and expenditure of £12,296, and by 1973, the school accounts show a profit of almost £12,000.

As for the inmates, there is a blithe assumption that all is for the best. The 1952 report says that "the boys seem to be quite happy in their dealings with their teachers. There seems to be very little punishment." The following year's visitation results in a judgment that "a splendid spirit of harmony and co-operation exists".

In 1961, "the happy community spirit is reflected in the life of the boys" and "each of the classrooms presented a picture of happy and contented boys". Yet there is no attempt to square this aura of happiness with the fact that, in the words of the 1967 report, "the boys . . are liable to run away at any time". Break-outs are noted in the most matter-of-fact tones. The 1959 report, compiled at the end of February that year, speaks of the fact that "since Christmas, 11 boys ran away at different times".

The subject is raised, not as a cause for alarm, but as an explanation for the failure of one of the brothers to attend regularly at early morning prayer: "He says he had to take the car and follow [the escapees] or that he got word from the guards that they had been captured and that he had to collect them and sometimes was not home with them until 1.30 a.m."

The documents do show an occasional awareness of the poor conditions in which the boys lived. The 1959 report complains quite strongly about the bad food: "I understand they get bread and tea for dinner three days a week. They get very little meat and the cooking and serving of it is not satisfactory." Breakfast on most mornings was a "saucer full" of porridge. "The only redeeming feature is that they get two sausages each on two evenings of the week." These complaints then cease, presumably because they were acted on.

The most important feature of the documents, however, is that they reveal a clear struggle between reform-minded brothers on the one hand and institutional power on the other.

By the early 1970s, there is tension over "discipline". The 1972 report claims that two of the eight brothers have "great difficulty getting on" with the brother in charge of administering punishment. This latter brother is stated in the report to be "over-rigid with the boys" and "scarcely a suitable person to hold his present position".

His two critics "disagree with his method of carrying out his duties as disciplinarian . . . so there is a troubled situation, a sort of cold war in the school, sometimes heating up in the presence of the boys".

The following year's report fills in some of the causes of these tensions. The younger brothers, it notes, are now rejecting "traditional" approaches and "believe that the boys should be given much more freedom, that greater attention should be paid to their emotional problems". This, according to the clearly disapproving visitor, has caused them "to be soft with the boys".

This same report reveals a quite extraordinary distortion of spiritual priorities. One of the brothers is noted for his kindness to the boys in his care, among whom he is "very well liked". He "spares no effort to add some little happiness to these unfortunate boys". He has "a great understanding . . . and genuine sympathy for them".

Yet the report actually suggests that this brother is the wrong man for the job. Why? Because he is not sufficiently assiduous in attending to his religious exercises in the morning. "His limitations as a religious . . . makes one doubt if he is a suitable person to have in charge of these boys." Since his name does not appear on the following year's list of the members of the Letterfrack community, it seems that he was in fact removed. There, perhaps, lie the seeds of an explanation of the powerlessness of the good people.

© The Irish Times

Orphanage sex abuser's sentence review plea

Irish Independent Wednesday May 19th 1999
By MICHAEL QUINN

A FORMER child care worker who is serving a four-year prison sentence for indecently assaulting boys in an orphanage had a review of his sentence postponed for updated reports in Kilkenny Circuit Court yesterday.

Myles Brady (67), with an address at Griffith Avenue, Dublin, was given seven concurrent four-year sentences in June 1998.

The court was told that the victims were aged between 12 and 14 years of age and three of them resided in St Joseph's Orphanage, Waterford Rd., Kilkenny. One boy was a visitor and he was abused when he called to see friends.

Garda Sergeant John Tuohy, Kilkenny, said Brady worked in the orphanage from July 1976 to June 1977. During that time he sexually abused a number of children in his care.

Brady had worked in child care from 1965 until his retirement. Most of his working career was spent in England.

Barrister Brendan Grogan SC, for Brady, said his client had applied for the Sex Offenders Programme in Arbour Hill but no place was available. Of the 300 prisoners seeking places only 10 were available which was woefully inadequate.

Mr Grogan said his client was not a risk to young people anymore. The offences occurred over a period of 10 months more than 20 years ago and nothing since then had been alleged against him.

The review of his sentence after a year in custody gave him considerable hope.

Judge Olive Buttimer adjourned the case to Waterford Circuit Court in July for a probation report, a psychiatric assessment and a report from the Curragh Prison governor.

© Irish Independent
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Compassion comes with uncertain cost

Sunday Independent May 16th 1999

Joseph O'Malley, political correspondent, on the implications of the Government's apology to abuse victims

WHEN Bertie Ahern, on behalf of the State and its citizens, delivered the Government's ``sincere and long overdue apology'' to the victims of childhood abuse in industrial schools and orphanages, he was showing compassion, and pleading guilty.

By agreeing to amend the statute of limitations, the Government was also opening the way for a spate of compensation claims. The legal change will allow the victims of childhood sexual abuse time to sue the Catholic Church and the State on an issue the State is badly placed to defend, given its own admission of liability.

All parties in the Dáil fully approved of the Government decision. The only unresolved question is how much it will cost the taxpayers. They must pay up for the State's past negligence, a negligence that society at large tolerated, if not condoned.

The Government response marked a radical change in approach from that previously adopted on negligence issues. On army deafness, it has contested the claims made. On Hepatitis C, resulting from contaminated blood products, the State denied liability, and refused to apologise. The result was some bitterly contested legal battles, like the McCole case.

Its tough stance also reflected the Government's dilemma, given its dual role. The Government has to protect the taxpayers' interest by fighting to keep compensation payments down. But equally, it has a responsibility to the victims of State negligence. And, balancing compassion with concern for the taxpayers' welfare is never easy to achieve, as former Minister for Health, Michael Noonan discovered two years ago over the issue of Hepatitis C.

On Tuesday, the Government, given the weight of evidence, had little choice but to apologise, and remove the legal impediment to claims for compensation. However, it confined the proposed change in the statute of limitations provision to cases of sexual abuse. In doing so, it has left the Law Reform Commission to examine the question of physical childhood abuse, and make recommendations on how this might best be handled.

When the Commission on Child Abuse set up by the Government reports in three months' time, the dimensions of the problem should be much clearer. At present there are some 174 compensation cases seeking damages for abuse, listed for hearing before the courts. But after the Dail amends the law to facilitate easier access to the court for abuse victims, the number of claims is expected to soar.

For the Government, it revives the question of how best to handle the spate of legal actions that both the State and the Catholic Church will have to defend. Over a 40 year period, some 42,000 children went through industrial schools, and one of the first decisions of Government may well be to try and ensure that compensation claims are handled by a tribunal, rather than through the courts, in a bid to keep both awards and legal fees down from the outset. However, this cannot be legally enforced.

The parallels with the army deafness claims are ominous, not least the difficulty in assessing the likely cost. Fear of a repetition of that debacle has haunted the Government as it prepared to tackle this issue in recent months. Ministers fully appreciate the grip of the compensation culture on Irish society.

The army deafness claims illustrate the point. Few can yet agree on the likely cost of compensation payments. Estimates have ranged at various times from £5.5bn the Committee of Public Accounts; £4.5bn Department of Finance; £350m Department of Defence; and some £100m the Law Society, a figure which was later withdrawn.

In the Dáil in February, Defence Minister Michael Smith said some 13,880 deafness claims had been received from current and former members. Almost 4,000 of these had come from serving members of the Defence Forces, more than one third of its current strength.

At that date, some £51m had been paid out in awards, with a further £14m in legal costs, or some 27 per cent of the sum awarded. If the Minister's proposals for a compensation tribunal are agreed, then almost certainly the costs to the taxpayer are likely to be much lower than the worst case scenario outlined.

Under the court system it would take up to 17 years to process the outstanding claims, as compared with the three years under the compensation tribunal now proposed by the Minister. If the settlements including legal costs were in line with those already agreed, and assuming no further claims, then the total cost of compensation might come to some £365m for army deafness. Or so the Government hopes.

The difference in the estimates made at various times for settling the claims is a measure of the uncertainty surrounding the cost of compensation, both in this and other areas. A year ago the cost of compensation payments before the Hepatitis C tribunal was projected to reach some £335m.

This figure is set to increase further, following a judgement in the High Court last month. This increased an award of £165,000 for ``general damages'' from the tribunal by a further £100,000, and is set to have major implications for pending appeals.

The Government last week had little choice but to accept its responsibility in relation to the damning evidence of ill treatment and abuse of those in industrial schools over many years, documented in RTE's States of Fear. But having done so by way of apology, and established a Commission as a ``healing forum'' for the victims of the State's own neglect, the uncertain financial consequences still remain to be counted.

© Irish Independent
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Home truths about our dishonest past

Sunday Independent May 16th 1999

Dermot Bolger believes poetry will come but if only we can resolve the unspoken quarrel within ourselves

I WENT to a Christian Brothers school. One in name at least. The principal and two teachers were brothers, but times had moved on and it was a 95 per cent lay staff. One didn't feel frightened of those decent and human if occasionally ineffective Brothers. Any violence there was came from lay teachers, young, passing through and with chips on their shoulders.

But in my first year, a remarkable thing happened. A Brother who had seemed an animalistic thug, obviously mentally unstable, returned from Africa. Aghast at changes, he appeared during maths or history lessons to kidnap us and march us up to the hall, where he made us sing hymns, jumping down to viciously attack any child he felt lacked religious fervour.

Here ends my total history of clerical abuse.

Within weeks, he was recognised as a danger and an embarrassment and shipped off. The remaining Brothers might have preferred me to become a GAA star, but did everything to encourage me to become a writer to the extent that when I wrote articles opposing much of what they stood for, one said, ``I don't support what you say but I support your right to say it.''

Looking back, the story doesn't end there.

Where did that Brother come from and where was he sent? Was he allowed near boys again?

Back then, it didn't concern me. There was just relief than a deranged man was removed from exercising control. Because at 13, I knew his control was absolute. He had power over the teachers that he interrupted and power that I knew no outside authority, be they parents, police or courts, could touch. Politicians and clerics wringing their hands on television and denying they ever knew what happened in industrial schools and elsewhere are either imbeciles or liars (to themselves as much as others).

I was a quiet, well-bred child, never in trouble. But, by the age of 12, I knew implicitly almost every detail of that reign of terror. Fellow Finglasman Professor Colbert Kearney has described seeing boys he knew emerge from institutions utterly changed, with something killed inside them. I never knew such boys, yet the street telegraph meant I was abreast of that regime.

Anyone who didn't know, either didn't want to know or didn't want to admit to themselves that they knew. Recently, I encountered a middle-aged group of ex-students from one school, furious at printed remarks by another former pupil about an unnamed teacher.

Having vented their indignation about the ex-pupil, they proceeded to reminisce about schooldays, each regaling the others with tales of the same teacher far more explicit than the printed story they'd condemned.

This type of doublethink forms part of what we are as a nation.

That the Government is now establishing a ``truth commission'' to formally drag into the light the truth about institutional childhoods is a huge step forward and a tribute to Mary Raftery.

But its findings will, in essence, tell us what we already knew and didn't want to know.

Every society survives through an ever-changing collective amnesia. Germans still claim they didn't know and Serbs will do likewise. We don't want to hear details of kneecappings that could rock our fragile illusion of peace. Elderly Swedes shake their heads at the present controversy over forced sterilisation of unmarried women there, who became pregnant during our own Magdalen Laundries period, and ask how is it a scandal when it was an open secret that everyone knew.

The most interesting newspaper letter I've read all week came from former Editor Brian Quinn.

He wrote: ``It was with mounting shame that I viewed Mary Raftery's States of Fear. Journalists of the 1940s and 1950s had their suspicions of industrial schools. Even in a climate of acceptance that Brothers and nuns were beyond repute, we should have tried harder to find out the real truth. In the defence of journalists of that time, we would not have been believed, and managements and editors would never have held out against a massed attack by the all-powerful Irish Catholic Church. From first-hand experience I witnessed one of the worst of the Christian Brothers break into the office of the manager and demand that a court case that mentioned Artane should not be used. Those requests should have alerted journalists to start inquiries into what was happening in Artane. That we did not is a heavy burden.

Journalists of that time were trapped in a carefully designed plot that mixed lies with official evasion and ecclesiastical terror. Nevertheless, I for one believe that we allowed cowardice to rule.''

This rare honesty has been lacking not only in Church responses but in the attitude of Irish society.

In 1988, I was given the manuscript of Paddy Doyle's classic autobiography, The God Squad, which certain other Irish publishers had declined. When I decided to publish, the publishers which then printed all my company's books, refused to print it. The only book I could find to confirm Paddy's accounts of inhuman beatings at the hands of nuns was The Children of the Poor Clares, published in Belfast (and generally ignored here) after 15 Southern publishers rejected it. Mavis Arnold and her co-author encountered open hostility while researching it in Cavan.

The God Squad sold hugely. After 1988, nobody had the right not to know any more. The nun who mainly assaulted Paddy Doyle was insane and known to be so by locals who took no action until she was eventually locked up. What could they have done? To stand against the consensus (as Brian Quinn honourably states) takes moral courage and would probably have been futile, though Noel Browne and Austin Clarke stand out with honour.

But that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been done by people in all walks of life.

Magdalen Laundries and industrial schools (with children regarded as criminals for having parents in the poverty trap) didn't exist in limbo. Washing came in, slave labour was hired out. Many people knew it was against their interests to question the system. And in truth, most Irish people felt the inmates deserved what they got.

Whether the Church likes it or not, its decent (silently acquiescent) ranks were infested with paedophiles whose actions and immunity Frederick West could only have gasped at.

The fate of Norbertine Fr Bruno Mulvihill (who tried to blow the whistle on Brendan Smyth, and was almost as hated as Smyth was by many within the Order) shows what happened to those who didn't acquiesce. Estranged from his Order, by the time of the UTV expose of his superiors' inaction, he was surviving by selling encyclopaedias.

The fate of the once-popular broadcaster Bill Long (whose radio career has been virtually non-existent since his famous Thought for the Day remarks) is also a lesson for those who publicly confront the truism that good lay teachers covered up for bad. I've yet to hear teachers' unions discuss those thugs who lurked in their ranks, no more than I've heard garda representative bodies apologise for regimes of violence in certain 1980s Dublin stations that shocked many decent guards.

Our ``one in, all in'' culture still exists.

People talk of a dying Church, but I'm not convinced. Stripped of arrogance and authoritarian power and forced to earn respect, I see it as potentially the start of a better Church. A Church fit to ask questions of others once it has asked questions of itself. It may require the retirement of various bishops, but its day will come.

The suggested millennium monument shouldn't be a triumphalist one of Christ, but a stone erected to those who suffered untold horror inflicted in Christ's name.

Yeats said, ``From the quarrel with others we create rhetoric, from the quarrel with ourselves we create poetry.'' It's time for rhetoric to end and painful poetry to start.

Abdication of power in a State of brutality

Sunday Independent May 16th 1999

We celebrated the `boyo', banned abortion and we buggered the orphans, writes Colum Kenny

STATES of Fear, RTÉ's long-overdue investigation into industrial and `special' schools, has confirmed our darkest suspicions about the sheer nastiness of parts of our educational system. For too long, especially if you were weak and poor, you could expect to be walked all over.

Vicious beatings by teachers as well as their crude bullying and savage sarcasm became common in many Irish schools of all kinds.

The authorities instilled dread rather than respect in the hearts of children. Not surprisingly, we learn now, the most deprived members of society suffered the worst.

And while RTÉ deserves credit for making the programmes, it's not so long since RTÉ itself decided against screening an award-winning drama series about child abuse by the Irish Christian Brothers. This was The Boys of St Vincent, shown late at night on Channel 4 but rejected by RTÉ just five years ago.

The reason which RTÉ gave at the time for not acquiring The Boys of St Vincent was that anyone who wished to see the programme could have caught it on the British channel.

This was neither true nor convincing.

The Boys of St Vincent series took the lid off systematic abuse at a children's institution in Newfoundland and had a great relevance for Irish audiences.

When I first saw it at the Banff Television Festival in Alberta, I was riveted. Indeed, a clip was included in the final part of States of Fear last Tuesday night.

It is probable that the St Vincent series embarrassed RTÉ. At best, perhaps, RTÉ did not wish to be seen having a go at the popular `Brothers', to be drawing attention to an Irish failure abroad.

At worst, RTÉ was simply afraid of the influence of the Catholic Church in general and of the `Brothers' in particular. But lately the established Church has lost much of its power and it's safe now to criticise it.

`Power', in fact, is the key word in all of this. The children in Irish institutions simply had no power and, therefore, they had no rights and few people wanted them to have rights.

For years a small number of campaigners has called for various reforms in our child laws and children's services and, right up to the present, they have been regularly ignored or fobbed off.

We banned abortion and we buggered orphans.

When we got our political independence, we might have created caring and responsive institutions. After centuries of experiencing the butt of imperialism, would not the Irish Free State be different when it came to wielding power?

Unfortunately, for decades, a sort of political brutality took hold.

Cultural or aesthetic sensitivity was scorned, artists persecuted, authors banned and fine buildings ravaged. We celebrated the `boyo', while in education, the revival of Irish was attempted in a fascist and futile fashion through terror and compulsion.

When making political decisions, democracy waited outside the door and the most crude form of jobbery and gombeenism took hold.

IT was to be decades before we began to emerge from the stupor of such grossness. Recent events suggest that we are not there yet.

No State is ever completely `there' but it's the trying at least that matters. We are still muddling our way out from under the consequences of our abdication of responsibility as an independent people who surrendered politics to the fixers and gave our children to the Catholic church.

Perhaps it was ignorance made us the way we were. Those who took over the running of this State had no tradition of self-government behind them. There was an element of bluff and bluster behind their posturing and of assertion in their high-handedness.

Things might have improved sooner had an open debate about the nature of our State taken place.

But uniformity was demanded and hysterical censorship ensured that ideas were suppressed. This suited both Church and State, as did the Church's provision of clerical labour and buildings in return for the control of our children.

We patted ourselves on the back and announced that we had the best educational system in the world.

But education was reduced to learning by rote Reading, Writing and Arithmetic or the Latin and Greek classics. The State did not welcome criticism and the Church, which ran the schools and colleges, did not welcome free thought. Science and the arts were neglected.

Instead of being a wonderful humanising influence, drawing on centuries of great learning and wisdom, the Catholic Church in Ireland became a terrible, narrow presence in the lives of many Irish children, especially boys.

Vicious beatings were widespread. While the State embarked on its doomed attempts to enforce the learning of Irish by means of fear fear of failure, fear of not getting a job, fear of not belonging to the language mafia priests and other clerics beat their way through classes in every subject on the curriculum.

Not even the colloquial expression, `He beat the bejaysus out of him,' gave them a moment's pause for thought as to the long-term spiritual damage they were doing in addition to any psychological and physical harm. Spirituality was reduced to the confession by children of insignificant sexual acts, while gross sexual abuse went unchecked.

In my own school, Belvedere College ostensibly a centre of excellence for the middle-classes we had a headmaster in the secondary school whose bullying marked for life many of those who passed through his hands.

By the wielding of his leather and the savagery of his sneering comments, the headmaster (now deceased) certainly did not inculcate a love of learning.

And when he had certain boys drop their trousers to better feel his leather (a fate I escaped, I'm glad to say), there was nobody there to see that he was not acting irrationally or out of sexual frustration or simply in a bad temper. And that was one of the best schools in Ireland.

God help the poor orphans.

Of course there were oases of kindness in education and beyond it, but our institutions were generally run on the basis of authority rather than accountability.

Necessary changes are still being dragged out of a secretive State which `loses' or suppresses official reports on children's institutions.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church employs expensive public relations consultants but shows no taste for talking about the significance of what actually happened.

In the light of the publicity surrounding RTÉ's three recent programmes, the Government has responded with a limited apology and a toothless enquiry.

Perhaps the authorities are still too busy to take complaints about children that seriously.

* Dr Colum Kenny lectures in Communications at DCU.