Monthly Archives: June 2009 - Page 2

US watchdog preparing report on child abuse

Posted by on 20/06/2009 No comments

KEVIN CULLEN in Boston

AN AMERICAN watchdog group says it is preparing an American version of the Ryan report to document the abuse of children and young adults in institutions run by religious orders in the United States.

It says it is also building a pair of databases that will name Irish priests and religious who abused minors in Ireland.

Officials at BishopAccountability.org, the Boston-based group that grew out of the scandal of the cover-up of sexual abuse of minors by priests that rocked the US Catholic Church seven years ago, said they were inspired to compile evidence of institutional abuse at some 1,000 institutions across the United States after reading the Ryan report.

Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, said the Catholic Church in the US was modelled on the Irish Catholic Church. Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century, the vast majority of priests in the US were Irish. To this day, about two-thirds of American bishops are of Irish descent.

“The Irish story is our story in America, too,” said Mr McKiernan, whose grandfather left Leitrim for Harlem.

Officials at BishopAccountability.org said they doubt their report will be as exhaustive as the Ryan report. “We do not have the resources of the Ryan commission, but we will try to emulate what they did,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org.

“In the United States, there has been a lot of attention paid to the abuse carried out by diocesan priests and covered up by bishops. The Ryan report made us realise that we have not had a similar accounting of the abuse at orphanages, boarding schools and minor seminaries run by religious orders in the US.”

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First sensible move to help abuse victims

Posted by on 20/06/2009 No comments

Bruce Arnold

The Labour Party has made the first positive and considered move, in the interests of the abused from the industrial schools. This is a month after the publication of the Ryan Report, but in the light of what the party is offering, there is no harm done in the waiting.

The Party tabled a Bill in the Dail on Thursday that seeks to amend the law on the vexed issue of criminality arising from the committal of young children to industrial schools through the district courts. The exoneration is as comprehensive as it could be.

The Bill also seeks to amend the Redress Act in respect of victims of abuse who failed to make claims in time or were excluded because the institutions to which they were committed were not listed in the schedule of institutions covered by the Act. This is another key issue for a number of men and women who have been blocked by it during the past ten years.

A third matter addressed by the Bill is also one of serious and deep concern to many of those who went through the difficult and arduous redress appeal system under the Redress Act. This is the imposition of secrecy on all who accepted money from the Board with very severe penalties for default. These ranged from €3,500 fine or six months in prison up to €25,000 or two years in prison, or both. No other defaulters, among the religious orders, for concealment, dishonesty over documents, or for perjury, had such criminal fines outlined in the legislation.

The fourth important issue covered in the Bill is the protection of documents, both those collected and filed over ten years by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the personal documents submitted to the Redress Board. These are a State heritage and the Bill recognises this.

The Bill also recognises the need to free all the documents connected with the Indemnity Deal from restrictions which have operated up to now, precluding them from the remit of the Freedom of Information legislation. There is a desirable addition to this: the inclusion of all the documents pertaining to the Cabinet decision in 1999 to embark on this inquiry and redress road.

Wisely, Joan Burton and the two men promoting the Bill, Pat Rabbitte and Ruairi Quinn, both of whom have a long-standing involvement in the issue of the abused, concede that the Bill might sensibly be taken over by the government. This would resolve its financial provisions.

It came as some surprise how little attention this Labour Party initiative attracted. RTE failed to report it at all on the main evening news bulletin and sent no team to cover it.

After a month of the media wallowing in the more sensational aspects of the Ryan Report, this virtual ignoring of a positive and sensible move to alleviate real distress among the abused is regrettable.

It would be logical to expect that this move by the Labour Party came out of the recommendations of the Ryan Report. No such logic prevails, however. Despite the enthusiastic agreement of all the politicians in the Dail to endorse and support those recommendations, which was done unanimously, they are seriously defective and do not address any of the issues now covered by Labour’s proposed Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009.
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FoI might have exposed abuse, says Information Commissioner

Posted by on 19/06/2009 2 comments

CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor

THE RYAN Commission Inquiry into the Abuse of Children in Institutions might not have been necessary if freedom of information legislation existed, according to Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly.

Speaking at a conference on the Freedom of Information Act organised by Public Affairs Ireland, she asked: “What might have been the outcome if 30 years ago, FoI legislation had allowed the public to rip away the secretive bureaucratic veils that hid the industrial schools and other institutions from clear view and exposed the practices therein?

“Leaving aside the abuse itself, a money trail might have uncovered the commercial exploitation of the children and the mismatch between State funding and the actual amounts parcelled out to the children by way of food, clothing and education.

“Other records would have revealed the complaints made and ignored, the low levels of educational attainment and other issues that took until the year 2009 to emerge into the daylight.”

She said the administration should draw very wide lessons from the Ryan report and consider how the Act could be improved. Referring to the exemption of the Garda, she pointed out that UK police were not exempted from the FoI legislation in that jurisdiction. “What harms have occurred in the UK as a result of
the police being subject to FoI?”
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Labour Bill to seek redress for excluded abuse victims

Posted by on 19/06/2009 1 comment

MARY MINIHAN

THE LABOUR Party has published a Private Members’ Bill that would cater for victims of abuse previously excluded from compensation by the Residential Institutions Redress Board.

The party’s education spokesman Ruairí Quinn said that some people had “very legitimate reasons” for missing the deadline for applications for redress.

“This issue has particularly been raised with us by groups in Britain who represent people who simply did not know about the existence of the redress board or who were simply too ill or traumatised to be able to apply,” Mr Quinn said. He added that some people were excluded because they were abused in institutions which were not listed in the schedule to the Redress Act.

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Learning to look out for the pooka in clerical clothing

Posted by on 19/06/2009 2 comments

MICHAEL HARDING

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR: THERE WAS A priest in my childhood who abused children. He was a fat, lardy gent, from a religious order, who lived close by, and had short hair, which reminded me of the bristles on a yard brush. He played golf, and he had a keen handicap, and lost his temper if his balls ever went into the rough. There was so much blubber on him that he reminded me of a rhinoceros I once saw in Dublin Zoo; and when he lost his temper he became even more like the rhinoceros – fast, and furious.

His body quivered with rage as he cursed, and watched golfballs fly across the ditch.

Twenty years ago I wrote a play called Una Pooka , about a priest who, on the outside, appeared to be as cuddly as Barry Fitzgerald in a cassock, but who on the inside was a destructive and demonic pooka, or phantom.

The heroine in the play was haunted by this mythic creature, who tyrannised her. He was ever-present to her, chastising her, undermining her; the Grand Inquisitor of her fragile mind, her tormentor and ultimately the orchestrator of her death.

The play also carried a simple and comic implication; that the papal visit of 1979 might hopefully be the funeral of clerical Ireland, rather than a fresh opportunity to paralyse and asphyxiate another generation of young people with the morbid legalities of religious orthodoxy. And while most people saw the play as funny, there were some astute critics who noted its darker side.
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To Whom It May Concern:

Posted by on 19/06/2009 6 comments

We have recently learnt that an Independent audit of the assets of 18 religious congregations which were party to the controversial 2002 redress agreement with the State is to be presented to the Government on the 24th June 2009.

The congregations, whose management of residential institutions for children which led to the recent Ryan Commissions Report, agreed to the audit at a meeting in Government Buildings on June 5th last with Taoiseach Brian Cowen and senior Ministers.

The congregations agreed at that meeting to contribute to a trust the Taoiseach proposed be set up, so that further financial and other supports can be provided to people who had been in the institutions as children.

It appears that the aforementioned meetings with the Taoiseach Brian Cowen and senior Ministers are being held without survivor – led organisations.
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A refugee of evil Irish past

Posted by on 18/06/2009 3 comments

By Kevin Cullen
Globe Columnist / June 18, 2009

She lives in a city north of Boston but grew up in Ireland, when it wasn’t green as much as it was black and white.

When she was 7, her mother died, and the father she knew as warm and kind grew cold and mean.

When she was 14, her father put her on his bicycle and pedalled 25 miles, to a convent.

“The nuns were nice until my father left,’’ she said. “I don’t remember saying goodbye to my father.’’

The nuns ran a school for orphans and the unwanted and a laundry peopled by older cast-off’s. They took her in and took her name. They gave her the name of a saint.

On your saint’s feast day, you got a hard boiled egg. Or a tooth brush. You didn’t get both, and you didn’t decide.

The laundry was like a prison, she recalls. You couldn’t talk at work, and you worked six days a week. The rougher, meaner girls were like trustees, and they curried favor with the nuns by enforcing a brutal code.

Every Sunday, the head nun, the Reverend Mother, sat before the laundry girls in a huge chair and read out the week’s transgressions. One day the Reverend Mother read her out, saying she had been talking at work. She called the Reverend Mother a liar, and two girls held her down while the Reverend Mother used scissors to cut off her hair.

Once, a nun accused her of having a dirty uniform.

She looked down and said, “There’s no stain there, sister.’’ And all at once her face was burning, because the nun smacked her with an open hand. She reacted, pulling off the nun’s habit. As punishment, she was placed in a small room for 48 hours. There was no food, no water, no window, no bed, no toilet. She held her bladder until it was bursting, and when she finally peed on the floor she felt like nothing.
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Michael Corry’s letter to the Irish Times 19 May 2005

Posted by on 18/06/2009 14 comments

Madam,
The skewed view of evidence referred to by Mary Raftery at the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Irish Times, 12 May) pales in significance compared to the activities of the Residential Institutions Redress Board. A place of secrecy, exclusion and bewilderment.
I have given evidence to the board on three occasions on behalf of three patients, all victims of layers of abuse, in particular sexual. Two of these have been under my care for over 10 years. All will bring their pain and suffering to the grave.
I was not allowed to be present when they gave their evidence, nor indeed were their partners, a friend, an advocate, no one of personal significance.
They were alone. Alone in attempting to articulate their exposure to regimes of unbridled rape and violence which lasted for years, at the hands of sadistic sexual perverts answerable to no one. Alone in telling about how their chance of a normal life was diminished from the beginning. About how they learned to place no value on themselves, and with their lives totally derailed following their release at 16 years old, drifted from one crisis to another for the rest of their lives.
One patient was left alone, on the verge of a panic attack due to the intensity of his fear, to tell the board of a past littered with criminal behaviour, prison records, substance misuse, dysfunctional relationships, mistrust of authority, and family breakdown.
yoursilences1 [click on picture to enlarge]

I found the discomfort of waiting in a side room to give evidence, aware of my patients’ fears and worries, unbearable. They dreaded getting a panic attack, a flashback to an incident of abuse, a rush of uncontrollable anger that would alienate the chairman and jeopardise the outcome.
In giving my sworn evidence I felt under time pressure, and worse, that I was an unwelcome irritation slowing down the proceedings. An atmosphere of minimisation prevailed. It was impossible to present a complete picture.

 
The “board” consisted solely of a judge and a medical doctor. On two occasions that doctor, having had no experience of working with traumatised or abused children, let alone a qualification in psychiatry, was nonetheless there for the purpose of contributing to a judgment on the compensation deemed appropriate for each victim.
Not being a court, it is held in secret, away from the eyes of the community, and no perpetrator of a crime is ever sentenced to a punishment.
No apologies can be offered as no one is there representing the religious orders responsible. Justice for the victim is not the purpose, only financial compensation, which is capped to a maximum of €300,000. (To date the average award paid out to 2,555 victims has been €78,000.)
The award is conditional on them signing a secrecy agreement and a waiver on taking further legal action. If the victims disclose the amount they were awarded or discuss the facts of their case in public, they face criminalisation.
The wronged now accused of a crime! They can be fined up to €3,000 and can face a summary jail sentence of six months. After a second disclosure, they face a fine not exceeding €25,000 and a two-year jail sentence. Why the secrecy? It’s certainly not for the benefit of the victim. There is emerging evidence that the Redress Board re-traumatises victims.
One patient of mine used this analogy. “An adult, man or woman, abuses a child. It is their ‘secret’. To make sure the ‘secret’ is kept the adult will give the child money or sweets. They buy silence. By making secrecy a condition upon payment, the board is doing exactly what an abuser does to a child.”
The elements of restorative justice which are required for the restitution of balance and healing are transparency instead of secrecy, formal apologies, the punishment of the wrongdoers, and supreme efforts to compensate for damage done.
The Redress Board embodies none of these. Its role makes a mockery of the legal system, and of the Goddess Themis, whose scales are the symbols of Right and Justice. It is my firm belief that the Redress Board contravenes the most basic of human and civil rights. In short, it represents a crime against humanity.
It should be abolished immediately and replaced by an open forum where the victim is not only properly monetarily compensated, but where they can have their perpetrators named, and the scales of justice balanced.

Yours, etc,
Dr MICHAEL CORRY,
Consultant Psychiatrist,
Dún Laoghaire.

Ryan taboo on warped sexual training of Brothers a cop-out

Posted by on 18/06/2009 4 comments

OPINION: Sexual violence is at the heart of Christian Brother thinking and practice. Sadly, the Ryan report fails to draw obvious conclusions, writes JIM BERESFORD

REFERRING TO the beating and humiliation of child prisoners described in the Ryan report, theologian Mary Condren (Opinion and Analysis, June 13th) says it was well known that “many religious congregations used the discipline, small whips, every week on their own naked flesh . . . Others actively practised public humiliation.” I thank Condren for breaking a taboo.

Indeed the Christian Brothers used self-flagellation to punish the sexual impulse, hoping thereby to preserve the vow of chastity. Novices as young as 15 at their Marino novitiate were issued with the “discipline” and instructed to use it whenever they fell into sexual sin by thought or deed. As one novice informed me: “we were told to whip our bottom while saying Hail Marys”.

Self-flagellation is not an aberration of Christianity; it is a form of mortification at least as old as western monasticism and is still practised by many Christians today. Many of the famous saints were self-flagellants and proud of it. A whipping is thought to purify the body of sexual sin – though in truth it often has the opposite effect. Although modern psychology regards the practice as an expression of psycho-sexual pathology, self-flagellation was an essential part of the religious formation of Christian Brother novices until the 1960s.

By the time he arrived at Artane reformatory aged 18-20, a Christian Brother would have spent most of his teenage years whipping his own bottom as punishment for what he believed to be his sexual sinfulness and he was likely by then to have developed a sadomasochistic sexuality. Before being dispatched to Artane a novice was briefed that reformatory boys were sexually depraved and therefore in need of strong sex discipline. The briefing notes for novices said: “These boys need firmer discipline than normal boys . . . your first three priorities should be discipline, discipline and discipline”.

Once in the prison, the novice was instructed by the resident monks how to punish a sex offence. This usually entailed administering up to 20 strokes of the cane or strap on the bare backside of the “offender”, especially one known or alleged to have been sexually penetrated by a monk or another inmate (The brotherhood chose to believe the rape of a boy was a mere misdemeanour and the boy himself the real transgressor). This was a form of punishment approved for use on recusant reformatory boys by the education minister – though the same minister strictly prohibited such punishment in Ireland’s national schools.

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Abuse victim challenges rejection by redress board

Posted by on 16/06/2009 1 comment

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

JUDICIAL REVIEW of a decision by the Residential Institutions Redress Board not to accept a late application, on grounds of exceptional circumstances, is to begin at the High Court this morning.

The board, in a written decision dated December 19th, 2008, rejected an application from “Peter” (not his real name) as being late and refused to find exceptional circumstances existed which would have allowed his application.

The deadline for applications to the board was December 15th, 2005. The only exceptions allowed were for people suffering from a mental incapacity or where there were exceptional circumstances. Such circumstances were not defined in the 2002 Act that set up the board.

Peter is in his 70s and has lived most of his life in the UK. He had been in St Patrick’s industrial school at Upton in Cork for six years, where he was abused. He applied to the redress board on January 23rd, 2006.
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