Monthly Archives: July 2009 - Page 2

Did this letter sink the Labour Party motion in Dáil Eireann?

Posted by on 10/07/2009 11 comments

To: Eamon Gilmore – Leader of the Labour Party

Re: The Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009

On: Wednesday 8th July 2009 – at 14.30h

On behalf of the membership of Irish SOCA, I have been asked to make representation to you on the Bill currently before the Dail which was debated yesterday evening 7th July 2009.

The feeling amongst our members is that the Bill as currently conceived has no hope of success without cross-party consensus which developed following the Ryan Report and that support of Government is absolutely vital for its safe passage through both Houses of the Oireachtas.

There are many laudable aspects to the Bill as presented, but the Government is engaged in various initiatives at present including an audit by a panel of experts of the assets of the 18 CORI religious orders that are signatory to the April 2002 Indemnity Agreement. A report from the audit Committee is expected by government in September this year.
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FG deputy seeks new investigation into former nun

Posted by on 10/07/2009 9 comments

MARIE O’HALLORAN

A CALL has been made for the reopening of an investigation into former nun Nora Wall, resident manager in the 1980s of St Michael’s Child Care Centre in Cappoquin, Co Waterford.

Fine Gael justice spokesman Charlie Flanagan said she “exposed the children in her care to unacceptable risks by allowing male outsiders to stay overnight at the Cappoquin care home centre in Waterford”.

He said: “It has been suggested that there were frequent visits to the Cappoquin home by some clergy from Mount Melleray Abbey. Access to children may have been a key motivation for these visits.

“We must bear in mind that that very abbey, Mount Melleray, was selected by the notorious paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth as a holiday destination or a haven to escape when he was on the run from the authorities in Northern Ireland. This issue needs to be revisited.”
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Quinn calls for school to become a museum

Posted by on 08/07/2009 4 comments

MICHAEL O’REGAN

LABOUR EDUCATION spokesman Ruairí Quinn suggested that a former Christian Brothers’ school in Dublin be converted into a museum commemorating the victims of abuse in religious institutions.

He said the former Coláiste Mhuire, on Parnell Square, was located beside the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and across from the Garden of Remembrance which paid tribute to the 1916 heroes.

“We, the State, the Republic of Ireland, now own that vacant building which was transferred to our ownership as restitution by the Christian Brothers as a contribution towards the cost of the redress bill,’’ he said. “We should fill it with the shameful memories of our past so as to ensure that our future never sees its repetition.’’

Mr Quinn was moving the Labour Party’s Private Members’ institutional child abuse Bill 2009 wiping clean the records of those detained in reformatory schools under criminal convictions.

“For purposes of law, survivors must be treated as if they have never committed, or been charged with, or prosecuted for, or convicted of, or sentenced for, any offence,’’ said Mr Quinn.
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Marijuana as Medicine Radio Interview

Posted by on 06/07/2009 3 comments

Paddy discusses Marijuana as Medicine, RTÉ Radio One Not So Different.
Marijuana as Medicine

NB This is a Real Audio file and requires Real Audio. Click on Download and the Real Audio should open.

Call for apology to survivors of laundries

Posted by on 06/07/2009 No comments

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

THE STATE has been called on to apologise to former residents of Magdalen laundries and to set up a new redress scheme, distinct from that available at the Residential Institutions Redress Board, for former residents of the laundries.

James Smith, associate professor at the English department in Boston College and author of the recently published book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries, and Mari Steed, of the Justice for Magdalenes group, said the State must “recognise, and thus apologize for, its failure to protect the legal rights of women who always remained citizens of the State”.

They said that, while recognising “the key difference in the nature of the State’s relationship to the Magdalen laundries” they “challenge the current terminology that characterises women as ‘voluntary’ committals to Magdalen laundries. We assert that the State was an active agent in ‘referring’ many of these so-called ‘voluntary’ committals, and as such the State is complicit in and culpable for the abuses therein.”
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Government may not name abusing priests

Posted by on 05/07/2009 2 comments

State fears compromising prosecutions by publishing Dublin archdiocese report in full
John Downes, News Investigations Correspondent

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin: says Dublin diocesan report will ‘shock us all’

The government may decide not to publish in full the names of priests identified in the report of the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation, even where they have been convicted of abusing children.

Unlike the landmark Ryan commission report into abuse at the state’s industrial schools, which decided controversially to give anonymity to every person it identified, the forthcoming report will name priests who have been convicted of abuse.

It has examined a representative sample of 46 out of a total of 102 priests who were suspected of abusing children in the Dublin diocese between 1974 and 2004.

But justice minister Dermot Ahern will have to seek his own legal advice about whether all of those identified in the report can be named in any version of the report to be published by him.

Both the commission and the government are concerned that the naming of individuals might hinder any current or future prosecutions.

As a result, the commission is understood to be considering leaving out the name of at least one priest which it had intended to identify for this very reason, although no decision has yet been made on this.

Ahern, who had been expected to receive a copy of the report this week, now appears unlikely to receive it until early next week.

This is because the commission is awaiting final responses from several people identified in the report, with a deadline for receipt of these set for the middle of next week.
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Labour appeals to Government over religious abuse Bill

Posted by on 05/07/2009 1 comment

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

THE LABOUR Party has appealed to the Government not to oppose its private members Bill addressing the concerns of victims of abuse in religious-run institutions in the Dáil next week.

The Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009 will be debated in private members time on Tuesday and Wednesday next.

Labour spokesman on education Ruairí Quinn said yesterday that the debate on the Bill “will be an important one for the Dáil and a significant test of the Government’s bona fides”. He also expressed disappointment that “no serious effort has been made by the Taoiseach or his Cabinet colleagues to address matters of concern to the victims of abuse”.

In introducing this private members Bill the Labour Party sought to address those concerns, he said.

The Bill proposes extending the provisions of the Redress Act to cover those who missed out on the December 15th, 2005, deadline for applications to the Redress Board.This, he said was “a particular issue for those who were resident in the UK”.

The Bill would also put “beyond doubt any perception that those abused may be regarded as having criminal records”.

It would remove “the confidentiality obligation imposed on those who appeared before the Redress Board which effectively prohibits them from recounting the stories of their childhood”, and make provision “to ensure that the records of the Redress Board and the Ryan Commission are not destroyed and are safely preserved for future reference”, he said.

The Bill also contains a number of measures intended “to establish the full story” of how the 2002 indemnity deal between the State and 18 religious orders concerned was negotiated and to ensure that the mistakes of 2002 are not repeated in any new round of negotiations with the orders.

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Compartmentalizing abuse … forgotten voices

Posted by on 04/07/2009 10 comments

“Are you the man who wrote the Magdalen book?” A voice, hesitant and frail, asked from the other end of my office phone. “I just finished it. I read about ten pages a day.” She called to share her story. She wanted someone to listen. She needed someone to understand.

Her mother died when she was seven. Initially, she and a younger sister were cared for within the extended family. The farm required her father’s attention. At fourteen, he deposited her with the Good Shepherd nuns in New Ross. Her sister was sent to the congregation’s Limerick convent.

The Good Shepherd Sisters managed industrial schools at both these locations. They also operated a reformatory school for girls in Limerick. But the two teenage sisters would live and work with the adult women in the Magdalen laundry. They remained enslaved, unpaid for their labor, for almost five years.

The Ryan Report evades this woman’s experience of childhood abuse. She was disappeared directly into the Magdalen laundry. There was no judge. No “cruelty man.” No committal order. She never was a ward of state. She was just dumped. Consequently, she exists in a legal limbo.

The Residential Institutions Redress Board ignores her experience of childhood abuse. The Dublin-based lawyers responded to her queries. She insisted she was a Magdalen and was never in the industrial school. They told her there was little they could do. The advocacy group “Justice for Magdalenes” helped petition the Redress Board on her behalf. Again, her case was not taken up. Her childhood abuse didn’t fit the legal parameters.

The recently published Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse tells a horrendous story. Irish society responds with anger, a sense of betrayal, and oft-stated disbelief. It seems intent on holding the religious congregations accountable. The government now accepts the report’s major recommendations. The Dáil passed an all-party motion pledging to cherish all the children of the state equally.

But what about those victims and survivors of institutional abuse not addressed by the report? What about Ireland’s Magdalen women and their families? Now is precisely the juncture that Irish society—state, Church, religious congregations, families, and local communities—should confront head-on the abuse of thousands of women in Ireland’s Magdalen laundries.
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Paddy Doyle on the Maurice Boland Show, Talk Radio Europe

Posted by on 01/07/2009 6 comments

Paddy Doyle, 23rd of June on The Maurice Boland Show, Talk Radio Europe, discussing dystonia, disability activism, and the Ryan Report on Child Abuse.

Paddy On Talk Radio Europe [23:47m]:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(thanks to Andrew)

Abused were hidden in clear sight, says ombudsman

Posted by on 01/07/2009 5 comments

PATSY McGARRY

FOLLOWING THE Ryan report “we all emerge . . . somewhat lost, unbalanced, the touchstone of our former beliefs and certainties cast adrift,” the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly has said.

“We stood exposed, not as an island of charming saints and chatty, avuncular scholars but as a repressed, cold-hearted, fearful, smugly pious, sexually ignorant and vengeful race of self-styled Christians,” she said

She recalled that at the 2004 Céifin conference in Ennis, Co Clare, she had wondered “what the real us [her emphasis] actually was, the old-style pious Mass-goers, or the new-style materialists.” She continued, “I wonder even more so in the light of Ryan.”

Speaking at the Sisters of Charity Justice and the Downturn conference in Dublin, Ms O’Reilly said that after six years as ombudsman, she had come to the view “that public bodies and agencies begin to go bad when they begin to lose sight of why they are there in the first place”.

Following Ryan “‘we didn’t know’, is the constant refrain,” she said. “Certainly, very few knew of the systemic nature of the abuse, of the near unbelievable extent and depravity of the sexual abuse in particular; of the political, bureaucratic and clerical cover-ups – but no adult living in Ireland throughout the period in question did not, in broad terms, know.

“If things were hidden, they were hidden in clear sight: the crocodile lines of boys and girls that streamed out of the institutions; the certain knowledge that corporal punishment at the very least was practised therein; the incarcerated Magdalene women in their Madonna blues and whites who walked the open streets of towns and villages in church processions. Judges knew, lawyers knew, teachers knew, civil servants knew, childcare workers knew, gardaí knew. Not to know was not an option,” she said.
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