Why is it that child sex abuse was more prevalent in Irish Catholicism than elsewhere? To answer that question it is necessary to go back to the Famine and examine how sex became a taboo, writes PATSY McGARRY

YOU MIGHT have seen that report on the RTÉ TV news last Monday from Charlie Bird in Mendham, New Jersey. There, they erected the first monument in the world to victims of clerical child sex abuse.

It is a 180kg basalt stone, in the shape of a millstone, with a chain running through it. An inscription attached reads, in those unequivocal words of Jesus from Matthew’s gospel, concerning those who would harm the young: “It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea”.

The monument was inspired by a suicide, in October 12th, 2003, of 37-year-old James Kelly, who had been sexually abused as a child by a priest in Mendham. His abuser was Fr James Hanley, who had served at St Joseph’s parish in Mendham.

It is not surprising that the first monument to clerical child sex abuse victims worldwide should have been made necessary by the crimes of a priest with an Irish name.

Irish names are prominent wherever in the English-speaking world clerical child sex abuse has been spoken of. Even allowing for the uniquely high number of Irish men among Catholic priests and religious worldwide, this phenomenon is striking.

Nowhere else in the Roman Catholic world has another nationality been as dominant among clerical child sex abusers. What was so different about Irish Catholicism that it gave rise to this?

In spring 2002, I was commissioned by the editor of an English publication to write about clerical child sex abuse from an Irish perspective. I pondered whether it was an Irish disease.

On receipt of the article the editor said he couldn’t print it. His publication had spent decades trying to escape an anti-Irish perception and were he to carry the article it would undo all their success in finally escaping that, he said. The article was published in The Irish Times on May 4th, 2002.

It noted all those Irish names among clerical child sex abusers. In Australia, they included Butler, Claffey, Cleary, Coffey, Connolly, Cox, Farrell, Fitzmaurice, Flynn, Gannon, Jordan, Keating, McGrath, McNamara, Murphy, Nestor, O’Brien, O’Donnell, O’Regan, O’Rourke, Riley, Ryan, Shea, Sullivan, Sweeney, Taylor, Treacy.

In Canada: Brown, Corrigan, Hickey, Kelley, O’Connor, Kenney, Maher.

In the US: Geoghan, Birmingham, Brown, Brett, Conway, Dunn, Hanley, Hughes, Lenehan, McEnany, O’Connor, O’Grady, O’Shea, Riley, Ryan, Shanley.

In the UK: Dooley, Flahive, Jordan, Murphy, O’Brien.

And, of course, all those in Ireland itself.

WHY IS CLERICAL child sex abuse more prevalent in Irish Catholicism? To answer that, it is necessary to go back. Until 1845 the Irish were a happily sexually active people. With an abundance of cheap food, the population grew. Patches of ground were subdivided with ever-decreasing acreage, producing a sufficient supply of potatoes.

In 1841, the island of Ireland had a population of 8.1 million. By 1961, the country having gone through the Famine and emigration, it was 4.2 million.

Another effect was an end to subdivision of holdings and diversification away from the potato to other crops, cattle and dairying. This wrench in land use had a defining effect on Irish sexuality. An economic imperative dictated vigorous sexual restraint as, regardless of family size, just one son would inherit. Others – sons and daughters – emigrated or entered the church. This late 19th-century pattern persisted into the 1960s.

Sex became taboo. Allied to prudery and a Catholic Church fixated on sex as sin, sensuality was pushed under. A celibate elite became the noblest caste. They had unparalleled influence through their dominance of an emerging middle class, the fact that they were educated when most were not, and the control they had over what there was of an education system and healthcare.

In tandem, Rome was experiencing one of its most dogmatic papacies under Pius IX. The longest serving pope (1846-1878), he lost the Papal States and eventually Rome itself to Italian reunification. As his temporal power decreased, he increasingly emphasised the eternal, and compounded a trend – extant in Catholicism since the French revolution – of alienation from this vale of tears.

Life became a test, a preparation for death and eternal life under the eye of what Archbishop Diarmuid Martin described last weekend in another context as “a punitive, judgmental God; a God whose love was the love of harsh parents, where punishment became the primary instrument of love”.

Pius asserted himself in Ireland through the doughty Cardinal Paul Cullen of Dublin, the first Irish cardinal. He received the red hat from Pius in 1866. Cullen shaped the traditional Irish Catholicism with its emphasis on devotional practice, which dominated at home and abroad into the latter part of the 20th century.

As well as preaching absolute loyalty to Rome (Pius promulgated the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1870) the Vatican’s celibate foot soldiers preached chastity as the greatest virtue. Irish women were expected to emulate the Virgin Mary. In 1854, Pius IX promulgated the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – that Mary was born without original sin – embedding still further in the popular Irish Catholic mind a profound association between sex and sin.

The clergy preached that celibate life was superior to married life; that sexual activity outside marriage was evil and even within where the intention was not procreation. Sexual pleasure was taboo, powerful evidence of an inferior animal nature that constantly threatened what was divine in the human.

The sermons of Irish Catholic clergy for most of the 120 years between 1850 and 1970 seemed dominated by sex. This railing, allied to a world view that saw the economic business of this earth as inferior activity in the eternal scheme of things, had inevitable consequences. Poverty and chastity saw to it that the marriage rate plummeted.

By 1926, for instance, the percentage of unmarried females in each age cohort was 50 per cent higher than in England and Wales and nearly three times as great as in the US. By 1961 the population of the Republic had dropped to 2.8 million.

The bachelor had become as integral a part of Irish life as the husband. So too had the spinster, with her penchant for overwrought piety. The Irish mother was totally dependent on her husband economically. It ensured an appalling time for some Irish women, as the absolute power of the husband was liberally abused in many homes. It drove many Irish mothers to seek solace in a higher purpose.

This often translated into a son becoming a priest. Nothing could bring such consolation to the devout Irish Catholic mother – whether in Ireland or abroad – as seeing her son with a Roman collar around his neck. It was said of Ireland’s seminaries during the middle decades of the last century that they were full of young men whose mothers had vocations to the priesthood. It helped that becoming a priest brought with it great power and status.

In 1954, a book, The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World , by John A O’Brien, was published in London. It questioned Ireland’s dramatic depopulation. Simultaneously the number of Irish Catholic clergy reached its highest level ever. In 1956, there were 5,489 priests in Ireland (diocesan and members of religious orders) – one for every 593 Catholics. There were also 18,300 nuns and Christian Brothers. Vocations were so high that between a third and a half of clergy went on the missions.
Read more »

Suzanne Breen in Paris

One of Ireland’s best-known priests has called on the Catholic church to halt recruitment to the priesthood until it has properly addressed the issue of clerical child abuse.

Fr Aidan Troy accused the church of “a wholly inadequate response to the horrendous abuse that has been uncovered”. He said the hierarchy must “take radical action rather than engage in window dressing”. The church here should ask the pope to visit Ireland to publicly apologise for the destruction of children’s lives, he said.

Troy came to prominence as parish priest of Holy Cross in north Belfast. For three months, he walked with the Ardoyne schoolchildren and their parents past a violent loyalist protest.
Read more »

One of the country’s leading summer schools is to honour victims of clerical child abuse.

The Humbert Summer Schoolin Co Mayo will also give commemorative awards to investigative journalist Mary Raftery, who helped uncover the scale of the scandal in institutions and Judge Sean Ryan who headed the long-running inquiry into church and state run schools and reformatories.

The awards will be presented by Nobel Peace Laureate and school president, John Hume, during a day-long debate on child protection.

Humbert School director John Cooney said the honour will mark contributions of the Commission, the long hard campaign of survivors to have their testimonies believed and Ms Raffery’s documentaries which alerted the public to the extent of child abuse.

Read more »

EITHNE DONNELLAN

GROUPS REPRESENTING survivors of abuse in industrial schools have warned the Government it must not allow the verification of the financial standing of religious congregations to become a lengthy affair.

The verification concerns those congregations which promised further redress to victims following the publication of the Ryan report in May.

Following a meeting of the groups in Dublin yesterday, John Kelly of Irish Survivors of Child Abuse said the Government was prepared for a “long drawn-out process” with the religious to establish their assets and to determine what could or could not be released to the victims.

But he warned victims would not stand for that. “We are saying to the Government they need to be more robust and they need to be more urgent about what needs to be done,” he said.

The Government appointed a three-person panel at the end of last month to assess the statements of resources submitted by religious congregations following publication of the Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse.

The panel, chaired by Frank Daly, former chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, has no specific deadline.

Michael O’Brien of Right to Peace and a former mayor of Clonmel, who spoke movingly about the abuse he suffered at Ferryhouse industrial school near the town, said it was of “serious concern” that the panel had no deadline by which they would have to report.

“This should take a matter of weeks rather than months. It’s a matter of serious concern that they have no timeframe because we have endured 10 years of waiting and suffering for all this to come to an end.

“We want to see this coming to an end soon so we may get closure, which is very important to us all,” Mr O’Brien said.

“I call on the Taoiseach to put a timeframe on it now.”

Mr Kelly said that he was anxious to ensure the panel had real teeth and was able to go after offshore assets held by the religious orders.
Read more »

By Bruce Arnold

Monday July 27 2009

John Kelly is a leading figure among the abused. Few people in the past 10 years can be unaware of his Daingean ordeal, flogged on the staircase of that abominable institution, his cries echoing up through the silent and listening dormitories, his punishment a fearful example.

For the past 10 years he has worked as Dublin spokesperson for Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA), fully aware of the public debate involving politicians and the Church, and also the behind-the-scenes debate. Irish SOCA stood for the abused and was independent. It spoke against consensus. It condemned the State’s silencing of the abused.

John Kelly was helped by Patrick Walsh, from London, and Jim Beresford, in Huddersfield. Beresford knew Father Moore, who exposed the Artane regime in 1962. Kelly emerged in the wake of the Ryan report to tell his experiences yet again.

He took a leading position, speaking on behalf of the abused, notably in respect of the pressure from the Government to get more funding from the Religious Orders.

The plight of the abused took on new impetus after the Ryan report, with the march from Parnell Square to Leinster House. This impetus and focus fell apart as a result of a letter written by Kelly to Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore on July 8, a week before the tabling of its Institutional Child Abuse Bill. In that letter Kelly wrote: “The Labour Party has Irish Soca’s permission to inform the Dail or other parties of interest that Irish Soca has requested the Labour Party to defer this bill until the outcome of the audit is known and government is better placed to make judgment on the way forward”. The letter supported the Government in opposing the bill. It failed its first reading.

The authority of the statement in the letter is being widely questioned. There was no reported meeting of “the membership of Irish SOCA”, whose numbers and membership are not known to me. The three I do know are named above. Jim Beresford told me he was not party to recent decision-making. Other organisations are not included. Nevertheless, the letter has had an impact far greater than Irish SOCA achieved during its campaigning over the past 10 years. The letter is viewed as having killed the Labour Party bill. This raises important questions that need answering.

Kelly called for cross-party consensus: “support of Government is absolutely vital” and he referred to “government initiatives” and to the Government being “better placed to make judgment on the way forward”.

We should not overlook the fact that Eamon Gilmore and those close to him did offer consensus and did seek government agreement. They said they would withdraw their bill if the Government drafted a similar one. We should also not exclude the culpability of Government on many issues during the past decade and the slow pace of initiatives now.

The Irish State, not just the Government, has been shrewd and skilful in eliminating consensus. Most of the questions that need answering concern representation. Who does John Kelly speak for and is it representative? How do the other voices of the abused make themselves heard?

There are more than 14,000 who have received state compensation. Many of them, some I have spoken with, feel that nothing more should be attempted, since it will go wrong. No one has asked them. There is a mechanism.

Read more »

A culture of denial, silence and sexual repression all helped create abusers, who were often sent abroad.
By John Downes, Public Affairs Correspondent

“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

At the end of the week when Frank McCourt finally succumbed to illness, the above quote, taken from his best known work, Angela’s Ashes, has rarely been more relevant.

Less than 24 hours after news of his death emerged last Tuesday, the long-awaited report of the commission set up to investigate clerical child abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin was sent to government.

More than three years in the making, the report is expected to outline a litany of abuses by Dublin priests, and repeated failures by their bishop superiors to put a stop to their actions.

But what is it about Irish priests that made them so prone to become abusers? And why, then, do such a large number of abusers in countries such as the USA and Australia have Irish origins?

Trying to understand the answers to these questions firstly requires an examination of the world in which both they, and many of the children they abused, grew up.

Repression

As the Ryan report repeatedly charts, Ireland during the majority of the last century was a society where repression and obedience, much of it church-led, was the order of the day.

Dr Niall Muldoon, national clinical director with the Children at Risk in Ireland (Cari) foundation, which counsels victims of abuse, notes that there was a clear emphasis by the Catholic hierarchy on “getting a child early on”.

As a result, you had 12- or 13-year-olds who were brought up to distrust close relationships – for example, always being told to walk in groups of three rather than two.

If you were a recruit for the priesthood, and you were found to be too close to someone, you were often punished.

The effect of this on young personalities still in formation cannot be underestimated.

“Straight away you’re teaching someone to be isolated, closed off, not sharing feelings,” Muldoon believes.

“I think this stunted their growth, and that added enormously to the prospect of someone going off the tracks.

“People thrive on love, companionship… But if you take a child at 12 or 13 years of age, and if their sexuality tries to raise its head against that background, it is hugely problematic.”

In this regard, Muldoon says the idea that young, inexperienced trainee Irish priests could freely commit to a life of celibacy is also difficult to comprehend.

“The concept of celibacy has to be considered in the context of someone who understands their sexuality in the first place,” he says.

“But a kid at 12 or 13… It’s like asking someone to give up chocolate having never tasted it. Celibacy has to be a mature, informed choice.”

So the trainee Irish priest was frequently faced with a type of ‘double whammy’ – the forced repression of their emotions, both in society and within the church structures to which they devoted their lives.

They were then expected to be outgoing and sociable as part of their work – something which served only to heighten their sense of isolation when they returned to an empty house.

Many priests found a way around the problems which celibacy can throw up – for example, through maintaining strong relationships with family members. Unfortunately, others did not.

But repression of sexuality, and the development of a culture of obedience, does not in itself explain why so many priests chose to express their frustrated desires in the particularly appalling form of child molestation and rape.

Clearly, the abusers have a large degree of personal culpability for the choices they made, regardless of their background.

In fact, the way in which the products of such a strictly Catholic Irish society chose to express their rage, anger and even sorrow varied hugely. This included alcoholism, gambling and depression, Muldoon notes.

Maeve Lewis, executive director of the victims group One in Four, also emphasises the impact of the strict authoritarian structures in place both in civil society and the Catholic church in Ireland.

She believes this was largely based on disempowering certain groups, for example on the basis of their class, gender or age.

“I think this also generated a complete culture of obedience, or non questioning, and a ruthless suppression of dissent… The response to those who tried to challenge the system was often to simply ridicule them,” Lewis says.

As a result, there was a huge lack of transparency or monitoring. And experience tells us that anywhere that has happened, abuses of power take place.

“I do agree that the formation process for priests involved no expression of intimacy within their lives,” she says. “They were completely cut off from their family and friends, and were people who had to suppress their emotions while at the same time operating at a very high intellectual level. There was such an emphasis on obedience.”

But she argues strongly that the priests were not operating in a vacuum.

“I think as a nation, our attitude to sexuality was, and perhaps still is, very very unhealthy indeed… This was bolstered by a church with a repressive attitude to sexuality. So sexuality was something to be tolerated rather than celebrated.”

Export

Another dominant feature of the Catholic church’s approach to child abuse has been the hierarchy’s practice of ‘exporting’ its abusing priests to other countries such as the US and Australia.

In his book, An Irish Tragedy: How Sex Abuse By Irish Priests Helped Cripple the Catholic Church, veteran Minneapolis investigative reporter Joe Rigert charts numerous examples of Irish-trained priests who continued their abuse once they reached the so-called land of the free.

Read more »