MARK HENNESSEY, London Editor Irish Times.

FOR MONTHS Basil Geoghegan has trained for an attempt in early May on Mount Everest to raise funds for hundreds of British-based victims of institutional abuse, many of whom are now elderly and frail.

The investment banker, who is co-chair of the Ireland Fund of Great Britain, is bidding to raise £100,000 for the fund’s Forgotten Irish campaign, which helps to fund the work of a clutch of Irish voluntary organisations in London and elsewhere.

The former inmates of industrial schools “were not forced out just by economic reasons, they were survivors of institutional abuse”, he says. “They have got their own Everest to climb every day and that was one that was thrust upon them, not one for which they opted.”

However, the voluntary organisations dealing with them, many of which do receive funding from the Irish Government, are now struggling with cuts of 20 per cent and more in aid from British local authorities and health bodies.

The Catholic Church’s compensation to victims – some of it in cash, but most in properties – is not “filtering” through “as fast as it should”, he complains. “For these people, every day is one day closer to the end of their lives so we have got to address this faster.

“Irish taxpayers are hard pushed. My message is to the church, show me the money. That money has to get to the point of need now. When money goes into government, by the time it comes out the far end there is an awful lot less. The money from the church is the bit that seems to have disappeared into thin air when you look on the ground.”

Geoghegan believes that many abuse victims still remain hidden in the shadows, unknown even to the Residential Institutions Redress Board. “We disbelieve that people could not have heard about compensation by now, but Ireland to us means the Wicklow Mountains, or U2. For them, they left de Valera’s Ireland where they had their heads shoved down toilets.

“Fifty per cent of survivors emigrated, but it is difficult to be precise. Of course, they weren’t going to go to the Irish Centre. Anything Irish reminded them of a terrible past. I am not surprised that these people are only coming out over time.”

Geoghegan leaves for Nepal at the end of this month, where he hope to make an assault on Everest in early May.

In its most recent awards, the Ireland Fund of Great Britain gave out £260,000 in grants, but the voluntary body, which benefited in the past from donations from Anglo Irish Bank, among others, is struggling to keep up its figures.

Sheila Bailey, the fund’s executive director, says: “We have donors with not so much cash. Along with services that are being cut, the demands on our resources are greater than they have ever been. It is an unenviable situation but one that many charities find themselves in.”

Illustrating the scale of need among abuse victims alone, Bailey says one of the voluntary groups it supports, the London-Irish Survivors Outreach Service, deals with 400 cases every month.
Tuesday March 14th.

The Irish Times – Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Detention order: this document grants the placing of a young girl in a Clonakilty industrial school. It is being auctioned on the internet.Detention order: this document grants the placing of a young girl in a Clonakilty industrial school. It is being auctioned on the internet.

Order of Detention for Sale on Ebay.

PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent

A 1913 document ordering the detention of a young girl in a Co Cork industrial school has been put up for sale on eBay.

It details how Fr Gus Ahern of the “North Cathedral, Cork” sought the detention of Mary Bridget McSwiney (sic) at Clonakilty industrial school, at a court hearing in Blarney.

The order was granted as she was “a child under the age of 14 years” who had “been found wandering and having a parent who does not exercise proper guardianship”.

Described as “Roman Catholic”, the child was to be detained until 1919 at Clonakilty industrial school, “it being a school conducted in accordance with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church”.

It was further ordered that her father, Eugene McSwiney, pay six pence a week to the inspector of reformatory and industrial schools in Ireland for the period of Mary Bridget’s detention.

The document has been put on auction with opening bids beginning at $29. It was placed there by Irish Celt, a Co Clare-based company which has been selling items of Irish memorabilia on eBay since 1998. As stated on its website, “our mission is to awaken memories from another era”. The company is run by Davoc and Anne Rynne of Knockliscrane, Miltown Malbay.

Last night, Mr Rynne said he had sold a similar detention document recently to a Kildare customer, who was “well happy” with it.

The documents had been brought to him by a furniture dealer who had discovered them in what appeared to be “a secret compartment” in a sideboard he had bought. There were two folders of documents in the compartment, only some of which the furniture dealer had sold on.

Paddy Doyle, author of The God Squad and whose own order of detention to Cappoquin was made in 1955 when he was four, found the eBay document “very sad” and “extremely poignant”. He was “disgusted and shocked, to say the least” at seeing it for sale on eBay.

But Mr Rynne described the documents as “a poignant piece of history”.

He recalled how Adams auctioneers had to withdraw Famine letters from sale recently due to public reaction. “I can understand that but we live in a capitalist society, so what can we do? I had to buy it.”

He added, however, he had been “thinking of taking it down” off eBay, where it was placed last Sunday, as “I wouldn’t like to be upsetting people”.

There have been so many novels about abuse that they seem glib compared with real life, writes Mick Heaney.

His experience had damaged him but, for a long time, Paddy Doyle resisted writing about it. In the late 1980s, Doyle was a budding scriptwriter who had tackled disability in his early works but had never faced up to the horrors that left him disabled. Institutionalised as a child after the death of his parents in the 1950s, Doyle had suffered such physical and sexual abuse at the hands of nuns that he ended up requiring brain surgery. Confined to a wheelchair, he had been unable to escape the legacy of his childhood, yet he tried to avoid the ghosts of the past.

”Then on day I sat down in front of the computer,” says Doyle. “I looked at it and I said: ‘I want to tell you something’. And I started typing. People said it must have been very cathartic and I always say, ‘You must be joking’. Because what you’re actually doing is rewinding the tape and reliving the whole business again. Especially if it’s autobiographical, you’ve to put yourself back into situations you’d rather not be in. I wondered whether anyone would care about it, so I would leave it only to come back [to it]. And The God Squad came out the other end.”

It may have been a struggle but, by writing about the abuse he suffered, Doyle made his name: The God Squad was a bestseller when it was published in 1988. The book also helped to change the Irish Literary landscape.

What started out as one man’s painful attempt to lay bare hidden crimes is now in danger of becoming a tired trope in Irish writing. Harrowing autobiographical tales have become ubiquitous in the years since The God Squad appeared and child abuse – be it domestic or clerical – has become a hot topic in the literary world. Doyle may have been unable to confront his demons in fictional form, but many Irish novelists have felt no such obstacles. In the process, a once searing subject has become mundane.

Skippy Dies, the new novel by Paul Murray, is the latest and most egregious example of the overexposure of child abuse in recent Irish fiction. Murray’s novel revolves around Daniel “Skippy” Juster, a mousy pupil at a fictional Dublin boarding school, who is buffeted by a futile romance, dysfunctional classmates and, yes, sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted authority figure.

Whereas Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was a louche comedy, Skippy Dies aims for something darker, in the form of ambiguous passages about its protagonist’s encounters with a creepy priest and a swimming coach. But given the schoolboy humour and the undergraduate philosophising that make up the rest of the novel, Murray’s exploration of such a sensitive subject looks like a botched effort at artistic significance.

Murray, however, is only following in the footsteps of more accomplished writers, notably Anne Enright, who won the Booker prize in 2007 with The Gathering, her claustrophobic novel of family abuse. William Trevor’s short story Men of Ireland, from his 2007 collection Cheating at Canasta, featured a priest who bristles at allegations of molestation of a former altar boy while paying him off; Patrick McCabe took a homicidal paedophile as a symbol of Ireland’s uneasy relationship with its past in his 2006 novel Winterwood; while Colm Tóibín’s collection of short fiction, Mothers and Sons, has two stories dealing with child abuse.
“Obviously, if you live in Ireland the issue of child abuse emerges strongly,” says Tóibín. “It is hard to leave it out. It comes in from the side for me, or sneaks in, rather than being the theme of anything I have published.”

Others take a more explicit approach. Last week the Abbey Announced a series of plays on child abuse: works include No Escape, a drama by journalist Mary Raftery drawing on the Ryan report, as well as James X by Mannix Flynn. Fiach Mac Conghail, the national theatre’s director, said the strand, entitled “The Darkest Corner, was intended to “investigate” the topic.

It could be argued that in writing about such a difficult subject, authors are living up to their reputation for intuiting the unsayable. Just as Joyce, Synge and O’Casey revealed the ambivalent truths beneath public pieties, so contemporary writers are throwing new light on a troubling issue. But in this case, Irish fiction is not saying anything original. Rather, literary novelists are following a path blazed by a less vaunted genre: the so-called “Misery memoir”.

Since the publication of Doyle’s book, memoirs about Irish childhoods blighted by abuse have become a publishing staple. The early 1990s produced Patrick Galvin’s Song for a Raggy Boy and Patrick Touhers’ Fear of the Collar. At that stage, writers had to tread carefully: a chapter about a Christian Brother who played classical music while he was abusing inmates at Artane industrial school was left out of the first edition of Touher’s book. “We thought there was a chance the Brothers would sue,” says Michael O’Brien of O’Brien Press, which has since published several memoirs.

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13 December 2009 By John Burke Public Affairs Correspondent – Sunday Business Post.

A panel set up by the government to review the finances of Catholic congregations has challenged the spending practices of several of the state’s major religious orders.

The panel, which is headed by Frank Daly, the former chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, has passed its review of the assets of the 18 religious orders to education minister Batt O’Keeffe. He is expected to present it to the cabinet next week.

The panel has issued draft reports to several of the religious orders, instructing them to clarify significant elements of their projected spending in future years.

They include spending on the future care and welfare of ageing members of their congregations, the maintenance of premises and the provision of existing services to the community.

However, well -placed sources said the orders had made a ‘‘robust defence’’ of all their projected spending as part of the review into their assets.

O’Keeffe will also present a separate report to cabinet on the offers made by the orders to a new trust which will be established for the redress of survivors of abuse in Church-run residential institutions.

The total value of the amounts offered to the new trust is expected to exceed €360 million.

About a quarter of the total amount is in cash and the remainder is in property. The largest offerings are from the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers.

The Irish Times – Wednesday, November 25, 2009
STEPHEN COLLINS and PATSY McGARRY

THE CABINET was briefed yesterday by Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern on the report into the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations by Church and State authorities in Dublin’s Catholic archdiocese.

A Government spokesman said the 750-page report would be published tomorrow.

Plans to publish it earlier were changed because of yesterday’s public sector strike. There were concerns that helplines would not be available for people who had suffered abuse.

In the High Court on Thursday last the report was cleared for publication, following some edits, by Mr Justice Paul Gilligan after a series of in camera hearings.

Victims’ groups yesterday called for victims to be given copies of the report a day before publication.

Meanwhile, Catholic Bishop of Kilmore Dr Leo O’Reilly has expressed “profound sorrow and regret” to a victim of abuse by a priest of the diocese who was jailed last Monday. Fr Michael Molloy (44), was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of defilement of a boy and one of possession of child pornography. The offences took place at a number of locations including a parochial house in 2006 and 2007.

Bishop O’Reilly said yesterday that he was first made aware of allegations against the priest by gardaí following Fr Molloy’s arrest in September 2007.

“This was the first complaint of any kind received against Fr Molloy during his years of priestly ministry. The gardaí and the HSE have been advised of all previous appointments held by him,” he said.

“I have referred his case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome and I now intend to initiate a canonical process in relation to Fr Molloy,” he said.

He said that “these past two years have been an extremely difficult and painful time for the victim and for the family of the victim.” He assured them they had been in his “thoughts and prayers”.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

PATRICK CLAFFEY

RITE AND REASON: THIS YEAR the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin is celebrating a year of evangelisation. The project’s website notes that “evangelisation is . . . an essential mission of the church”.

Necessary, courageous, no doubt, but, one might well ask the question, “why now?”

A friend told me, several years ago, of a conversation he had with a prominent Irish bishop whose diocese had the first exposure of an abuse scandal. “With this, what time do you think I have left for evangelisation?” asked the forlorn pastor. But worse was to come.

In recent times, it can be argued, the Catholic Church in Ireland has reached the nadir of its long history on this island. This institution is paying the price for its past success and for the kind of clerical dominance that almost inevitably leads to arrogance and the abuse of power.

Is it entering a land of exile?

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By Conor Ryan, Political Correspondent

Monday, August 24, 2009

THE author of the report on institutional child abuse has said the country will be tested by how it deals with the fallout from the inquiry’s revelations.

Mr Justice Sean Ryan, chairman of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, also said but for the tenacity and courage of the victims, their horrific treatment at the hands of religious orders would never have come to light.

He said the ability of the perpetrators to get away with their crimes reflected wider problems.

“It says a lot about our society, institutions and our systems in the past that these events happened.

“It will also say a lot about our present situation as to how we respond to the disclosure of these events.”

Mr Justice Ryan made his comments when accepting the Humbert Award, which was given to him in recognition of the work the Commission had done.

It was his first public statement since the shocking results of the inquiry were published in May. He said now the report was in the public domain it was up to society at large to ensure it effected the necessary change. “Our work is there to be seen, to be analysed, to be discussed, debated and reflected upon. This is the best report we could make.

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Monday August 24 2009

IT was a far cry from that bleak May day when survivors of institutional abuse were not admitted to the long-awaited news conference in a Dublin hotel at which Mr Justice Sean Ryan published his damning report into systematic abuse of children by religious orders in State run institutions.

At the weekend, three months later, Judge Ryan stood side by side for a family photograph with representatives of survivors’ groups and journalist Mary Raftery, whose documentary, ‘Suffer Little Children’, first alerted the public to the scale of child abuse in what was known as “Catholic Ireland”.

The judiciary, the abused and the media came together in the Co Mayo market town of Ballina to receive special awards presented on behalf of the Humbert Summer School by its honorary president, John Hume, the peacemaker in Northern Ireland and Nobel Laureate.

Saturday on the banks of the rain-swollen River Moy was a day of remarkable salmon leaps in the torrential saga of state and media probing into what has become known as ‘the Irish disease’.

In his first public appearance since his explosive findings were made public, Judge Ryan paid a moving tribute to “the courage and fortitude” of the abused, whose horrendous evidence about their experiences as children is now permanently recorded in the landmark report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which he chaired. Judge Ryan did not hold back from giving full credit to the residents of State institutions for bringing to light “events which were shrouded in darkness for so long”.

In turn, survivor Michael O’Brien, the former mayor of Clonmel who captured the nation’s imagination by challenging the platitudes of Government minister Noel Dempsey on an unforgettable RTE ‘Questions and Answers’ programme, bowed to the good judge and thanked him “for the momentous work you and your team have done”. But Mr O’Brien was only prepared to give conditional pardon to the religious congregations who locked up him and thousands of other children in penal institutions as serfs. He will forgive his oppressors only when he knows in his heart that “these people mean it when they say ‘we are really, really sorry’.”

“I do not want silly apologies. I want to see repentance,” he said.

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