OPINION:
Those responsible for decades of abuse must act to restore credibility and help the survivors.

WHERE DOES the church go from here? The church has failed people. The church has failed children. There is no denying that. This can only be regretted and it must be regretted. Yet “sorry” can be an easy word to say. When it has to be said so often, then “sorry” is no longer enough.

But “sorry” must always be the first word.

The Ryan report shocked me. But it did not totally surprise me. I was ordained 40 years ago today and at my ordination and that of a friend we had a group of former residents of industrial schools: people of our own age, great people and friends of ours.

As students we had worked in a hostel in Dublin for former residents of industrial schools, especially Artane. Later I worked in a centre in London for ex-prisoners, a large proportion of whom included generations of Irish industrial school residents. The stories they told then were not radically different from what the Ryan report presents, albeit in a systemic and objective way which reveals the horror in its integrity.

Sadly, the Ryan report came so late.

Anyone who had contact with ex-residents of Irish industrial schools at that time knew that what those schools were offering was, to put it mildly, poor-quality childcare by the standards of the time. The information was there.

A chaplain to Artane had put much of it writing. A few courageous and isolated journalists like Michael Viney spoke out. When the first efforts were made to reform Artane, it was patently evident that the only change possible was to close it down.
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BOOK OF SOLIDARITY: MEMBERS OF the public queued for over an hour yesterday to sign a book of solidarity in Dublin’s Mansion House for the victims of abuse.

For much of the day, the queue stretched up to St Stephen’s Green as ordinary citizens waited patiently to express their solidarity with the victims.

The signing was scheduled to end at 4pm but had to be extended past 6pm because of the numbers arriving.

By tea-time, more than 4,500 people had signed the book.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny were among those who signed over the weekend, but the throng included many former residents of institutions and their children.
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It was not just the Christian Brothers and members of other religious
orders who were culpable of the abuse of thousands of children from the
1930s onwards.

Although they were the perpetrators of the abuse, a whole swathe of
middle-class Ireland – who knew or should have known, but who couldn’t
have cared less – is also to blame.

Judges were among the most culpable. It was they who ordered the
incarceration of children in these institutions, often on grounds they
must have known to be bogus. Other more senior judges who gave legal
backing to the decisions of their judicial inferiors were also culpable.

Barristers and solicitors colluded in this. The media did likewise, by
ignoring it. General medical practitioners must have kept their eyes and
ears firmly shut never to have noticed anything remiss on visits to
institutions where barbarous acts were perpetrated on children as a
matter of routine, and where the evidence of such barbarity must have
been apparent on the bodies of the children.

Bishops, parish priests and many, many more must have known what was
going on, and did nothing; they also colluded in what happened.

Was it because these children were of the ‘‘workers’ class’’, and
therefore of little consequence that the collusion and complicity prevailed?

There are so many things which are simply staggering about the conduct
of the Christian Brothers. Obviously, there is the callous cruelty of
the conduct of so many of its members, the few hundred who inflicted
sexual abuse and the many more who inflicted appalling and criminal
physical abuse.

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The religious orders were aided and abetted by a society in thrall to a punitive theology, writes BREDA O’BRIEN

A SINGLE sweet pressed into a child’s hand once a week during the rosary, which probably saved a girl’s sanity. A kindly old brother, with starving boys flocking around him, grateful for the bread he kept for them. A shopkeeper who broke the canes in his shop over his knee, and then told the astonished child who had been sent to buy them to tell the nuns they were out of stock. “The only boy from Gorey” remembering how his dreadful loneliness so far from home in Artane was lightened by one “brilliant” Brother. These, and other incidents, are like pin points of light in the otherwise unrelenting darkness of the Ryan commission report.

And like pin points of light, they only serve to emphasise the darkness. Small acts of kindness were treasured, and recounted years later, because they contrasted with the desperate bleakness of these children’s existences. Of course, there were larger kindnesses, too, such as nuns who provided emotional shelter for years for past pupils. But mostly it is a litany of cold, grey, bleak lives, where children had to contend not only with loss of family, often including siblings, but the fear of arbitrary, unfair punishment and constant hunger. Many carry literal scars, and are haunted by memories of sexual exploitation and degradation.
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