Abuse victims deserve far better treatment than this

IN HIS second stage speech to the Dail, introducing the Residential Institutions Redress Act at the beginning of last year, Michael Woods gave a bland and generalised picture of the climate in which abuse developed in the institutions of residential care. He suggested official neglect, with the churches and charities stepping in to help. It was, he said, "difficult and largely unrewarded work", improved a bit by the Children's Act of 1908. As late as 1970, however, "the Kennedy Committee found that the industrial and reformatory schools were housed in old and often unsuitable buildings, the institutions were under staffed by under trained or untrained personnel, the emotional needs of the children were not catered for even though they came from backgrounds of deprivation, an institutional approach prevailed, and financial provision made by public bodies was inadequate as was the system of inspection."

He claimed that this litany of deficiencies was as much the fault of contemporary Irish society and its leaders, as it was the fault of managers of the schools who, in many cases, were making do with the few resources they got. "Should it surprise us then that many children suffered emotional neglect, were hungry and poorly clothed, that corporal punishment was frequent and that the regime in most of the institutions could best be described as harsh?" That was his version, and it was designed to spread the blame over us all, embracing the Church, but identifying no real culprits. Now let me give the true picture. It was not the fault of Irish society, it was the fault of Government, more specifically successive Ministers for Education and the Department of Education.

The managers were not "making do". They were perverting the law and misusing the funding. The financial provisions were adequate, and the feeding and clothing of inmates could have been properly organised, as could their education and training. The system of inspection was a good one, and had previously worked well. The suffering that Michael Woods refers to should surprise us, since it was neither necessary nor ordained. It was imposed deliberately, perversely, wickedly. It did untold damage. No one within the system tried to stop it. Most turned a blind eye or ignored what they knew. The Kennedy Report, praised vastly beyond what it merits, was also wrong in its analysis. The State on its foundation in 1922 inherited an effective piece of legislation, the Children's Act of 1908, controlling institutional care and covering the administration of all institutions for children including industrial schools, orphanages, homes for disabled children and ordinary children's homes. The new Redress Act of 2002 lists 128 institutions, most of which were in existence or came into existence during the early life of the State.

The administration was the responsibility of the Department of Education. The Children's Act of 1908 was a dedicated legislative instrument, laying down standards for clothing, food, education, training and discipline. There was a countrywide inspectorate. This group of public servants was required to carry out annual inspections and file reports. The institutions had to have a manager who was answerable to the State. Those reports are still in the department. They are a record of the total collapse of the system that was required by law under the 1908 Act, many provisions of which are still in force. The inspectors, and the State, intimidated by the Church, failed totally to carry out their assignment designed to ensure the proper upbringing of the inmates, boys and girls.

Instead, they allowed the almost complete abrogation of control and protection. This led to a climate of cruelty, neglect, indifference, brutality, sexual exploitation, and the maiming and deaths of children. For years the majority of these children were underfed, and suffered disablement as a result. There was adequate money to feed them, provided by the State, sequestered and used for other things by the managers. The disciplinary regimes were appalling. The institutions were far worse than the most brutal of prisons, and lacked any of the restrictive controls that the State exercises within its prison system.

When the issue of child abuse became a major shame faced by the country, it was realised by many people, that there was some benefit to the State - and in a sense to the Church - if the burden of blame were somehow to be shared, blurred and diluted. It was always seen that the Church had compensating factors in its favour. It could claim good works, and it could rely on the faith of many of its supporters. But whatever may have been the problems facing the Church, it was recognised from an early stage that the Department of Education had no such sympathy in its favour. As a consequence, the appalling neglect and indifference of the Department, and of generations of its inspectors, have been kept in the background.

So, too, have the reports. These whitewash documents, a disgrace to the civil service men and women, including doctors and trained personnel, who wrote them, are virtually impossible to obtain, and have not been made the subject of the supposedly redemptive Residential Institutions Redress Act. The Department, as a culpable institution, does not figure at all. Nor does the Act provide for the inspectorate and its reports to be part of the process. It is essential to recognise that, while the widespread abuse was taking place in Artane and the legion of other notorious institutions, year after year reports went to the Department which gave no expression at all of unease over what was happening. It was known that things were seriously wrong. And it was known, not just occasionally, but year on year and decade on decade. And nothing was done. The law, represented by a sound administrative weapon, the Children's Act, was ignored.

It had worked in the early years of the last century. It worked tolerably well in the 1920s, for which I have seen early assessments and reports, and then it broke down. Far from the State wishing to deal openly and fairly with the enormous problem of abuse throughout the Irish institutional world for children from 1930 until the 1970s, the opposite is happening. The institutional reports, which still exist, as they should in law, are the key to the monstrous offence that was done to so many children over so many years. What actually happened is covered in a vast unwritten catalogue of every known abuse. This was spread across the whole State. What the State itself chose to see of this was nothing at all. No action was taken on foot of any report. No prosecutions were pursued. No managers were rebuked, removed or imprisoned.

The numbers of abused are estimated modestly at 2,500 or thereabouts. And the global figure for compensation is frequently expressed as €50,000. The real figure for abused men and women, if they felt more trusting of the climate in which to present themselves, would be around 20,000, and the range of payments, by any standard, should rise from a minimum figure of €50,000 to an average, for the destruction of a life, of €300,000. We have short-changed the abused. We have solved their problem with a totally inadequate scheme, badly cobbled together, unfair, containing seriously threatening elements, and backed by a secret deal parts of which were published yesterday, further parts of which are published by this paper today.

Michael Woods was in charge during much of the work of setting up this falsely persuasive answer to abuse. He joined the Cabinet sub-committee on Abuse when he was Minister - of all things - of the Marine. He took overall charge of legislation and negotiations from 2000 until the passage of the Act in 2002. After the election he went to the back benches where he is now. Noel Dempsey is unlikely to be happy with many of the provisions of the Act, some of which are extreme and inexplicable. Nor will he be happy with the secret deal. Whether he will act or not remains to be seen.

Whatever he does, abuse victims throughout the country and in the United Kingdom, where many of them went in flight from their experiences here, will be looking at the present situation with new perceptions now, emphatically more critical and more suspicious than they were.

Bruce Arnold Saturday January 11th 2003

Victims deplore early release of Brother

By Eithne Donnellan

A religious brother given the longest sentence for child sex abuse in the history of the State was released from the Curragh Prison on Saturday after serving just three years of a 36-year sentence. James Kelly (76), otherwise known as Brother Ambrose, was taken from the Kildare prison by his order, the Brothers of Charity, to an unnamed institution in the State where he is to receive therapy and counselling.

The name of the institution is known only to the Brothers of Charity and Cork Circuit Criminal Court, where earlier this month Judge Patrick Moran told Kelly's victims that the Brother would, on his release, be housed in a place where he would not be in a position to reoffend.

He said he was happy the institution to which Brother Ambrose would be taken was "the appropriate place for him". However, he did not name it, saying the management at the institution were entitled to privacy. Brother Ambrose, who is in poor health, admitted he could not remember the names of all the boys he abused. He was jailed for 36 years in 1999 for sexually abusing boys in his care in the 1950s and 1960s in Galway and at the Lota children's home in Glanmire, Cork.

Mr Eoin Little of Irish Survivors of Child Abuse yesterday described Brother Ambrose as "the Adolf Hitler of abusers, the worst on record in Ireland". He criticised Judge Moran for releasing him and suggested that if Mr Justice O'Flaherty resigned over the Sheedy affair, Judge Moran should also consider his position. A man abused by Brother Ambrose, Mr Alan Carroll, said the decision to release him was a major blow to child sex abuse survivors throughout the country.

"I will never rest easy as long as that man is out there. Nobody knows what that man is capable of. I fear for the safety of children," he said.

© 2002 The Irish Times

CRIMEN SOLICITATIONIS

The document came to light because it was referenced in a footnote to a May 18, 2002, letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, to the bishops of the world regarding new procedures for sex abuse cases.

Crimen sollicitationis is a secret document issued by the Holy Office of the Vatican (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in 1962, instructing bishops about how to handle cases in which priests were accused of using the privacy of the confessional to make sexual advances to penitents. The document also instructs bishops on how to handle cases of the "worst crime", in which a priest is sexually involved with an animal, child, or man. Canon lawyers disagree about the extent to which the document is still in force.

The document calls for such cases to be handled in secret, and extends that secrecy to the document itself. The document imposes secrecy even upon victims of sexual abuse. Extreme penalties for violations of secrecy, including excommunication that can only be dismissed by the pope himself, are imposed. Perhaps as a result, some bishops claim not to have known of its existence.

Crimen sollicitationis came to light in 2002, in the context of new procedures for handling accusations that priests had sexually abused minors. Lawyers involved in cases against the church have argued that the document is evidence of obstruction of justice. In response, defenders of church policy have argued that the policy of secrecy extended only to Canon law actions up to and including defrocking of a priest, and would not have prevented a bishop from reporting accusations of child molestation to the civil authorities. They also argue that, because the document was a secret, it is unlikely to have influenced the actions of church officials.

CRIMEN SOLICITATIONIS FULL ENGLISH TEXT

The wounds of abuse will never heal if we betray the balanced view

The wounds of abuse will never heal if we betray the balanced view

04 December 2001 By Ronan Mullen

"WHAT can you get for 23p a day?" Anyone listening to RTE radio these days will recognise the station's campaign to justify its TV licence fee. To the sound of an apple being munched, we are told all about RT?'s good deeds - from concert orchestras to news on the web. The message is clear: if we're getting all this for 23p a day we're doing fairly well.

But are we? Watching last week's Prime Time special about the Christian Brothers and sexual abuse in Australia, Canada and Ireland, I had reason to wonder at the way our fee is being spent. It's not that I had any difficulty with the subject matter chosen by Mary Raftery (producer of the States of Fear documentaries) and presenter Mike Milotte. Institutions run by the Christian Brothers were places where young people suffered enormously. Hard labour, physical and sexual abuse were commonplace. The Laffoy Commission is investigating as many as 2,000 reports of physical and sexual abuse, many concerning Christian Brothers' institutions.

We are entitled to ask how Christian men could have perpetrated such abuse on innocent children and why nobody put a stop to it. We should examine the issue in its full context - whether abuse only happened in homes run by Irish religious orders or in secular institutions, whether it was connected with religion or, as is more likely, with an institutional mentality that failed to respect the rights of children. These questions should be teased out, and RTE should be talking to victims, the religious orders themselves, psychologists, sociologists and historians to help explain how such evil occurred.

But that's not what we got. Even the title, Betrayed: The Christian Brothers and Child Sex Abuse across Three Continents, suggested more interest in ratings than in a balanced treatment of complex issues. And that was how it turned out.

The head of the Christian Brothers had declined to talk to the programme. This is a communications problem which the Christian Brothers will need to address. But the tone of the Prime Time special - and the producer's near complete failure to provide balancing interviews - perhaps shows that he was right on this occasion.

Prime Time focused on the abuse perpetrated by Christian Brothers in Australia, and followed up with an assault on the legal strategy employed by the Christian Brothers in Canada to protect its schools in the face of compensation demands. They relied heavily on interviews with victims and their lawyers.

Lawyers shouldn't be fighting propaganda wars on television. They should confine themselves to legal work.

The Christian Brothers should be settling as generously as possible to avoid putting victims through the trauma of full court hearings. And they deserve criticism if they are hiding their assets to avoid paying compensation. But we were denied the necessary balance to make up our own minds on this.

RTE equated partial truth with the full truth. They failed to give any figures for compensation in Canada or to present any objective analysis on what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable recourse to the legal system.

They also ignored another important question. Are adequate systems in place to protect against bogus claims? Columnist Breda O'Brien noted that in one school in Nova Scotia the number of former staff accused of abuse rose dramatically as soon as a compensation scheme was announced. In the end $38 million was paid to former residents of that school. In such circumstances, it would be hard to blame a religious order for trying to protect its assets.

Mary Raftery and Mike Milotte gave us no such careful analysis. They even allowed one lawyer to question, unchallenged, "whether the existence of the Christian Brothers was ever a good thing". I wonder what the family of Brother Noel Bradshaw would make of that. Brother Bradshaw was captured by rebels in Sierra Leone. He has spent over 10 years working in Makeni Catholic Mission where he has lived in a leper colony and worked with victims of war.

It is hard not to feel sympathy for the vast number of Christian Brothers who have given their lives in the service of others. It must be galling for them when RTE gives such uncritical coverage to suggestions that most Christian Brothers were in some way depraved, while providing no figures to put the number of abusers in its proper context.

It's also hard to be optimistic about RTE's future coverage of sex abuse. We've seen this imbalance before. States of Fear was justly criticised for failing to give historical context or balanced overview, but these criticisms were never accepted by Raftery and her team. The evidence from Prime Time was that they intend to give us more of the same.

Some days an apple seems like better value.

Willie Delaney was a child slave in Ireland

Fintan O'Toole draws parallels between conditions in a Connemara reformatory 31 years ago and the continuing reality of child slavery on which the world's media focused this week

For a brief moment this week, the attention of the Western world's media focused on a story that is usually ignored. The strange voyage of the dilapidated Nigerian ship mv Etireno up and down the coast of west Africa with what was thought to be cargo of desperate children, forced us to notice that child slavery is a continuing reality. UN estimates suggest that about 200,000 children work as slaves in the region, many on the plantations that furnish the chocolate for the Easter eggs we gave our children while the Etireno was being sought.

For most Irish people, news of the persistence of such barbarity in the modern world will have come as a shock. Our hearts were touched by the description of the plight of these children by Esther Guluma, the Benin representative of Unicef: "They work hard all day, you don't have to pay them very much and they don't complain. They are subjected to hard physical labour, they are uprooted from their families, they don't have any access to education. It has a real impact on their physical and mental development. Those trafficked as domestic servants, a lot of them are sexually exploited." Uprooted from their families, worked like dogs, deprived of a decent education, sexually exploited - this is the fate of child slaves. The only consolation to be derived from thinking about their lives is that all of this goes on far away in a savage but distant place. It belongs to the heart of darkness out there beyond the reach of civilised norms. Just as the Etireno was docking in Benin and the world's attention was wandering off the subject of child slavery, the remains of Willie Delaney were being disinterred at St Kieran's Cemetery in Kilkenny. The grim operation was part of a long-running Garda investigation into allegations of sexual and physical abuse of children at St Joseph's industrial school in Letterfrack, Co Galway. The hope is that a post-mortem on Willie Delaney will show whether he died of natural causes or as a result of a beating at Letterfrack.

Though it is not politic to use the phrase, Willie Delaney was a child slave. The conditions of child slaves in west Africa as described this week by UNICEF - hard labour, deprivation of family life, lack of education, sexual exploitation - are precisely those that prevailed at Letterfrack and throughout the industrial school system. For all the shocks applied to the national conscience by Mary Raftery's States of Fear series on RTE, that reality has still not been fully recognised.

When Willie Delaney was sent to Letterfrack as a 10-year-old in 1967, St Joseph's was essentially a labour camp for children. Until it closed in 1974, it advertised the extraordinary list of services quoted by Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan in their book Suffer Little Children from the institution's letterhead: "Orders Received in Tailoring, Bootmaking, Carpentry, Bakery, Cartmaking, Smithwork. Also Wire Mattress, Hosiery, Hearth Rugs, Motors Repaired, Petrol & Oils Supplied." Though it was meant to be a school, the education of boys like Willie Delaney took second place to unpaid labour in the workshops that provided these services and on the large farm attached to the institution. While he was there, an internal Department of Education memo acknowledged the utter inadequacy of schooling, due in part to "pupils, particularly senior pupils, having to undertake tiring physical work in the afternoons due to (the) shortage of paid labour in the institution". The Christian Brothers, who ran St Joseph's, saw the children in their care as vital economic assets. The financial health of Letterfrack depended on securing as many as possible of what the Brothers' internal visitors' report for 1953 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. Declining numbers in the late 1950s seem to have led to operating deficits, but these would appear to have been reversed in the 1960s. By 1969, when Willie Delaney was there, Letterfrack had income of £19,131 and expenditure of £12,296, and by 1973, the school accounts show a profit of almost £12,000.

The child slaves who created these profits, like their counterparts in west Africa, were fair game for sexual abuse and physical violence. In the early 1970s, even the Christian Brothers' own internal reports were highlighting tension over "discipline". The 1972 report notes that the brother in charge of administering punishment was "over-rigid with the boys" and "scarcely a suitable person to hold his present position". Whether Willie Delaney's death had a bearing on these internal arguments is something that may only become clear when the extensive Garda investigation bears fruit.

IT IS tempting to think that all of this happened a very long time ago. Yet few regard the political events of the Arms Trial crisis in the same year as Willie Delaney's death as a mere historic footnote. Getting to grips with those events is seen as essential to any proper understanding of the way we are now. Acknowledging the reality of modern Irish slavery is, if anything, even more important.

Were he alive, Willie Delaney would now be just 44 years old. Thousands of Irish people now in early middle age should properly be regarded as survivors of child slavery, whose experiences at the hands of church and State are not fundamentally different from those that still prevail in west Africa. Even as we hand in our collection boxes for Trocaire's splendid Lenten campaign against slavery, we need to remember that the heart of darkness can be very close to home.

© The Irish Times