By Henry Chu – Los Angeles Times

March 24, 2010 | 11:30 a.m.

Reporting from Bray, Ireland – She shot to fame 20 years ago with her shaved head, chiseled cheeks and haunting rendition of the song “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Then she gained notoriety when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on American TV, calling him “the enemy” and urging people to fight child abuse.

Sinead O’Connor is still singing. And she’s still speaking out against abuse — only now her 1992 stunt on “Saturday Night Live” almost seems prescient as the Roman Catholic Church faces a growing catalog of complaints about child sexual and physical assault by priests in her Irish homeland and across Europe.

Such mistreatment was rampant here in Ireland, going back decades. By 1987, the Irish church was alarmed enough that it took out an insurance policy against future lawsuits and claims for compensation stemming from sexual-abuse allegations.

This past weekend, Pope Benedict XVI issued a “pastoral letter” apologizing to the flock in Ireland for the church’s past failures. He did not outline any disciplinary action against the bishops who many here say covered up priestly misdeeds, though on Wednesday he accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee, who had been accused of failing to report suspected pedophile priests to police. The pope also pinned no blame on the Vatican itself for a culture of secrecy that critics say it deliberately fostered.

O’Connor, now 43 and a mother of four, spoke to The Times on Tuesday at her seaside home in Bray, south of Dublin, about the abuse scandal.

Do you feel the pope’s letter was enough?

It’s a study in the fine art of lying and actually betraying your own people. . . . He starts by saying that he’s writing with great concern for the people of Ireland. If he was that concerned, why has it taken him 23 years to write a letter, and why did he or the last pope never get on an airplane and come to meet the victims in any of these countries and apologize?

The letter sells the Irish [church] hierarchy downriver by stating again and again that the Irish hierarchy has somehow acted independently of the Vatican. . . . The documents are there to prove that that’s a lie. . . .

If you were the boss of a company and some of the employees of your company were known to sexually abuse children, you would fire them instantly. You would also go instantly to meet the people who had been abused and profusely apologize and offer your help in any way whatsoever to deal with this. . . . That has never happened.

As a cardinal, the pope wrote an order in 2001 demanding that abuse cases be dealt with in secret. But doesn’t the directive also mention cooperating with civil authorities?

That document stated that all matters of abuse were to be sent to him in Rome, where he would decide whether they would be dealt with by Rome or locally by the bishops. They were to be dealt with exclusively by the church, and they were subject to pontifical secret, which means you can be excommunicated if you breach the secret. . . .

[It's true that] it’s the first time ever that any document coming from the Vatican actually does say to the clergy that they should cooperate with civil authorities. . . . What I object to here is, the first time they said that was 2001. They knew back in 1987 at least that this was an issue. . . . They knew so much that they took out an insurance policy.

So what should the pope do?

There should be a full criminal investigation of the Catholic hierarchy of any country in which this has been an issue. There should be a full criminal investigation of the Vatican.

There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope. The pope should stand down for the fact that he did not act in a Christian fashion to protect children, and for the fact that his organization acted to preserve their business interests decade after decade rather than be concerned about the interests of children, and for showing so much disrespect for Christ, God, the victims, the rest of us, their own clergy. . . .

The Vatican and the pope need to get on their knees and confess the full truth in the same language they make us use in Mass. . . . They need to get on their knees, open everything up, be transparent, tell the truth, ask the people for forgiveness and prayers.

That confession is their only hope of survival into the 21st century. It’s a rickety bridge, but it is a bridge. And personally, I would be willing to bring them across that little bridge into the 21st century and help them. . . .

If they don’t do that, they will not survive. . . . I hope they do survive, because there’s a lot that’s really beautiful about Catholicism. Even though there are those of us who are fighting it like you would fight an abusive parent, you love the parent still and you want it to be healed.

What about the abuse victims?

He [the pope] says his concern is “to bring healing to the victims.” But he’s denying them the one thing which might actually bring them healing, which is a full confession from the Vatican. . . .

You’re talking about some very broken people. . . . Life is very difficult for them. They can’t hold down jobs, can’t hold down relationships. . . . Life is difficult. Therapy costs a lot of money. These people don’t make much money; hardly any of them are actually fit to work. They need the Vatican to cough up some of its billions [to] pay for these people to be able to live their lives.

Should Irish bishops resign, as a few have offered?

Resignation gets them off the hook. They should be criminally prosecuted. . . . If you or I covered up crimes like that, we’d be slap-bang in jail in five minutes, and rightly so. There’s a double standard. . . .

What should the Irish people do?

It’s the good-hearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this — they are the people who have the power in their hands to get the Vatican on its knees and confess. . . . How these people can do that is by refusing to go to Mass, boycott them until they actually come to their knees and confess. . . .

The way we are at the moment, we’re in a very dysfunctional relationship with an organization that’s actually abusing us. And we can’t see what’s being done to us. We have the mentality of a battered wife who thinks it’s her fault. If we had a friend in a similar relationship, we would beg him or her to walk away.

Yet you still consider yourself a Catholic?

I’m a Catholic, and I love God. . . . That’s why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into. . . .

I’m passionately in love and always have been with what I call the Holy Spirit, which I believe the Catholic Church have held hostage and still do hold hostage. I think God needs to be rescued from them. They are not representing Christian values and Christian attitudes. If they were truly Christian, they would’ve confessed ages ago, and we wouldn’t be having to batter the door down and try to get blood from a stone.

From Cllr Sally Mulready
London Irish Centre

Dear Editor

As I sat in my home in East London watching Cardinal Brady tell the Irish nation what was in the Pope’s long awaited letter, I thought of the thousands of Irish people, hurt damaged and defiled who fled Ireland after a childhoods of unbearable and unimaginable brutality at the hands of Catholic priests, nuns and Christians brothers.

I visualised and knew they would be sitting in their homes all over Britain watching as I did, looking for every word that would be recognition of their pain, their suffering and their struggle to live ‘normal’ lives with their families, their children and in their communities. I know many of them would have wept as I was moved to do, unable to articulate whether the Pope’s letter made the hurt and the ever present painful memories seem any less so by his apology .

After a day of reflecting on the Pope’s letter , I find I cannot be satisfied. I know it has not taken away the pain and though the Pope endeavoured in that very sincere and Pontifical Way to express sorrow , remorse and even pity to the Survivors , in the end the protection and the renewal of the Catholic Church and the failure to acknowledge that crimes against children were being covered up, were the paramount messages I discerned from his letter. I am very disappointed and hurt by the inadequacies of the Pontiffs letter. The justice survivors seek cannot be obtained merely through prayer and other ecclesiastical reflections on a so called Higher Authority. Cannon law has shown itself to be corruptible and not always on the side of truth . It will not in itself bring justice.

But I am an optimistic and determined soul. And there are were some hopeful indications that the Pope had begun to understand what had happened and as a result there is a way forward and for that I say thank you to Pope Benedict.

The Popes had strong words of condemnation for his ‘ priests and religious’ who have abused children. He called on them to ‘take responsibility for their sins’ and to ‘submit to give an account of their actions’ and to submit to ‘the demands of justice’. Can we now interpret that to mean that the Pope will not let Cannon law stand in the way of bishops reporting offenders still alive today and obliging them to submit themselves to the law of the land. They have committed criminal acts that should be subject to the due process of his law.

Another hopeful sign of the Popes letter is his address to his Bishops who he accused very forthrightly of being guilty of ‘serious mistakes in responding to allegations of sexual abuse and it had …’undermined their credibility and effectiveness’. Good and decent though some of our existing Bishops are they need to go. We must have a fresh start and their prolonged stay is simply putting off the inevitable. The Pope has I feel given them a way of going with their dignity and their record of service to the Catholic church still intact. Hang on now and they will be forced to go in a matter of months in disgrace.

The Pope’s recommendation that his priests offer up ‘fasting, prayer and reading of scripture’ should be extended to making themselves available to talk and listen to Survivors accounts of their suffering.

They need to know and understand more from the perspective of Survivors what happened. Along with their reading of the Scriptures, I recommend they talk to ordinary survivors in their communities , listen to them with humility and compassion . They should also read reliable and recognised accounts of Survivors as portrayed in Mary Raftery Documentary, States of Fear and in the harrowing account written in the God Squad by Paddy Doyle. With this new knowledge and understanding we can begin to start the essential process of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Sincerely

Cllr Sally Mulready

Chair of Irish Women Survivors Support Network
Published in The Irish Post Newspaper.

The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world, a debate held by Intelligence² on 19 Oct 2009

Stephen Fry speaks about the Catholic Church, the Pope, Abuse and other issues. Well worth listening to and watching the video.

Chair Zeinab Badawi introduces the motion ‘The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.’

Use the chapter bar on the right-hand side of the page to view each of the panelists’ speeches.
The link to the full debate is here.

If you want to skip directly to Stephen Fry, the link is here but the full debate is worth watching if you’ve time.

Initial Vote: 678 For, 1102 Against, Undecided 346

Final Vote: 268 For, 1876 Against, Undecided 34

Sinéad O’Connor singing The Times They Are A-Changing — From the Late Late Show April 2nd 2010

What is a Real V.I.P ?

Do we have the balls to go to that party?
Or would we rather dance with vanity? Tell me now what’s a real V.I.P?

Who are we to give that name to us?
When we don’t know the lives of others.
When we can barely raise a finger.
to help our own sisters and brothers.

Wasn’t it in history.
The artists always spoke their people’s needs?
Now we’re gorged upon what devils feed
In the shallow form of M.T.V

Telling the youth to worship futile dreams.
And long for bling and for material things.
I tell you what a really real V.I.P is..
A face that never was nor will be kissed.

To whom exactly are we giving hope?
When we stand behind the velvet rope.
Getting our pictures taken with the pope
Like some sick April fool kind of joke.

Who is the real V.I.P?
The true and the most conquering king
Who looks around at everything?
And knows exactly what we’ve been.

His is the face that never was nor will be kissed.
Do we think we’ll be down on his guest list?
When we’re standing at the gate.
After being fashionably late.

There’ll be no make-up and there’ll be no film crew.
No vuitton bags and no manolo shoes.
When he’s presiding over you.
Asking you did you love only you.

Or did you stand for something else.
Besides the hankering for fame and famousness.
The one who always was and always is
Will show you what a real V.I.P is.

The fatherless.
The motherless.
The ravaged child at home
who cried to you.
You will be asked to say
what did you do.

What is behind his velvet curtain?
Don’t know but I can say for certain
The face that never was nor will be kissed
Will tell you what a real V.I.P is.

Sinead O’Connor. February 20th 2010

By Andrew Madden

Thursday February 11 2010

IN her column in this newspaper last Saturday, Mary Kenny chose to make reference to my spiritual life. She pitied me for having no spiritual element in my life, assuming it consisted only of the material and was therefore bland and unimaginative.

Mary Kenny has, of course, never met me, never phoned me, never asked for a meeting or an interview over coffee, never tried to contact me in any way to ask me about anything. Until now I have made little or no reference in public to what spiritual life I do have, so she had absolutely no information on which to base her opinion. What she did have was the most contemptible arrogance to assume to know enough to write about it anyway. A more ignorant, condescending pouring out of sanctimonious drivel I have not read in a long time.

All Kenny knew was that I had completed the formal process of defecting from the Catholic Church, and from that one single fact she assumed to know everything else. Next week she’ll probably preach to us all she knows about humility. Thousands of others have chosen to leave the Catholic Church too but, unlike Kenny, I don’t assume to know all of their reasons.

I have been a Catholic in name only for many years, but after all I have seen of the church in recent times, I decided I did not want that organisation in my life anymore, not even in name only. To assume, as Kenny does, that I therefore have no spirituality in my life is truly reprehensible. I am crossing a line here I haven’t crossed before, but Kenny’s nonsense last Saturday cannot go unchecked. Almost 13 years ago I tried to stop drinking, having tried twice before and failed. I had been an active alcoholic for 14 years by then and was quite a mess at the end of it all. Anything I did, in all those years I was drinking, was done with a drink in my hand. I lived at about 10pc of what I was capable of and I struggled to do even that.

When I stopped drinking I had to learn how to live without it. I had to learn how to be. How to get through a whole day without getting drunk. How to pass an evening. How to enjoy music. How to conduct friendships properly. How to relax at the end of a day’s work. How to socialise and meet people sober.

I also learned that I could not do all of this by myself. I had friends who themselves had crossed the bridge from addiction to normal living, but more was needed. Over time, as I slowly became happy and confident, I accepted that I was receiving more help than that of friends. I came to believe in a power greater than myself and came to believe that that power was helping me stay sober and helping me learn to live happily. I chose to call that power the “Spirit of Recovery”. It didn’t come easy or natural for me to start believing in any such power, but as time in recovery passed, my belief in a power greater than myself grew. Instead of believing that a higher power was just helping me stay sober, I believed that it was helping me in all areas of my life. As a friend of mine says: “He’s looking after all of it, or none of it.” I see my higher power as a loving, caring essence in my life that wants me to live a good life.

Today I try to hand my will and my life over to the care of that higher power every morning before I leave the house in order that my actions and thoughts might be guided by my higher power’s will for me. At night I review my day and thank my higher power for everything, including the fact that I didn’t drink. I ask my higher power to look after other people too, just like I used to ask God to do when I was a little boy lying in bed thinking I would one day be a priest.

But of course, I don’t need to be a priest to believe in a power greater than myself, spirituality is not the preserve of practising Catholics. And having a sense of oneself that extends beyond the physical and the material is not an understanding exclusive to the obnoxious Mary Kenny.

And the next time she chooses to write about other people she should afford them the courtesy of getting her facts right first, and keep her patronising pity to herself.

Andrew Madden’s best-selling book ‘Altar Boy’ helped expose abuse in the Catholic Church

- Andrew Madden

Irish Independent

Thursday, December 31, 2009 – Irish Examiner.

CLAIMING that the new “information wasn’t available” when he rejected a distinct redress scheme for Magdalene survivors, Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe’s response rings hollow (Irish Examiner, December 17). It is important, moreover, to emphasise that evidence of state complicity rests not only with the materials laid before the Department of Justice on December 14.

Indeed, the Department of Education must also acknowledge its own complicity in this matter.

Had officials from the department attended the scheduled meeting with Justice for Magdalenes (JFM), I would have pointed to the department’s awareness of children being placed in Magdalene laundries as late as 1970 (beyond those transferred from state residential institutions).

This awareness never led to direct corrective action or intervention. Indeed it is still unacknowledged. As such, it calls into question the department’s commitment to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”.

The Reformatory and Industrial School Systems Report 1970 (ie, the Kennedy Report), commissioned by the Department of Education, documents two distinct populations of children so confined. In a discussion of children placed in “religious convents” by “parents, relatives, social workers, welfare officers, clergy or garda”, the report states that “the committee is satisfied that there are at least 70 girls between the ages of 13 and 19 confined in this way who should properly be dealt with under the reformatory schools’ system”.

Likewise, in a table attempting to capture the “total number of children in care”, the report asserts that there were 617 children resident in “voluntary homes which have not applied for approval”. As the department can affirm, these “voluntary homes” were typically Magdalene laundries and other “religious convents”.

The report’s two figures – 70 and 617 – offer a snapshot for the scale of the problem in 1968/’69. My questions to the officials from the Department of Education, again if they had attended, would have been the following:

1. Given the department’s awareness, and the moral and constitutional obligations to protect children and provide a basic minimum education, can the minister now account for each of these children?

2. Given its awareness that children were being “cared” for in these institutions, did the department ever visit, inspect or license these “religious homes”?

I ask these two questions in light of the Ryan report offering a window into what life was like for children transferred to the laundries from a residential institution.

We are told the regime was “like a prison”, that doors were locked all the time … working conditions were harsh, “constantly washing laundry in cold water and using heavy irons for many hours”. One survivor remembers her child labour: “I did collars; you had to keep ironing them until they became real stiff. There was a little wooden thing you could stand on.”

Read more »

Letters to the Editor, Irish Independent. Friday 23rd October 2009

The proposed €500,000 “memorial to victims of child abuse” (Aine Kerr, Letters, October 19) bearing the words of Mr Bertie Ahern’s 1999 “apology” to Ireland’s former child prisoners is an expensive and offensive political gesture.

The planned structure is not a memorial to the victims; it is a monument to Mr Ahern, a former Taoiseach whose utterances few take seriously now.

Readers may remember that in 1999 Mr Ahern (then Taoiseach) issued the following statement, which is now to appear on the memorial:

“On behalf of the State and all the citizens of the State, the Government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue”.

That statement is not an apology but a denial and a deception. It is simply not true to say that the State failed to detect the pain being suffered by the child prisoners. Time and again that pain was reported to the State and the politicians each time dismissed the reports and tried to discredit the messenger.

Even Fr Flanagan, an Irish American priest who in 1946, drew attention to the ill-treatment of the child prisoners was dismissed as a liar by the Minister for Education, Sean Moylan in the Dail.

Besides, the State’s reformatory rules, which were published for all to read, authorised the infliction of pain upon the inmates.

Naked flogging of the child prisoners was approved and condoned by successive Ministers for Education and their inspectors into the 1990s.

Only in Ahern logic can you authorise violence and then deny all knowledge of it.

A memorial bearing Mr Ahern’s fake apology will be a permanent reminder of Ireland’s denial and a standing offence to its former child prisoners.

The Ryan Report on Ireland’s child prisons (May, 2009) recommended the construction of the memorial and claimed, with Ahern-type logic, that the structure would somehow “alleviate … the effects of abuse on those who suffered”!

But Justice Sean Ryan failed to explain how Bertie’s denial carved in stone would work its magic on the former child prisoners.

I escaped from Artane prison and from Ireland in 1963. I am one of many thousands of child prison refugees. Ireland denies me the simple justice I request, namely, the recision of the illegal detention order that put me in Artane.

Consequently, I shall renounce Irish nationality and never set foot in Ireland again. I will therefore, thankfully, never experience the memorial’s miraculous healing powers.

The memorial is a political stunt. It has nothing whatever to do with alleviating the suffering of the victims. It has to do with salving the collective conscience of a nation racked by unacknowledged guilt for the mass-persecution of its children in the post-independence era. It is a monumental insult to Ireland’s former child prisoners.

JIM BERESFORD
FORMER ARTANE CHILD PRISONER 14262
SALENDINE NOOK, HUDDERSFIELD

Living and surviving abuse

My Name is Derek Power and I am a victim and active survivor of clerical childhood sexual abuse.

I first arrived at the Waterford Rape Crises Centre in the summer of 1995 having been referred by a relative. At this point in time I was 25 years of age. I had been raped and abused as a child by a member of the Christian Brothers in the late 1970’s over a two year period when I was of a tender age while a student at a primary school in Waterford City.

In October of 1993 I made my statement to Gardai in Dublin where I lived at that time. My statement to detail the circumstances of my abuse and rape at the hands of this man took over two hours. I spent the following 18 months alone and with the memories and torture of that experience while an investigation was being carried out. In this period I had started to develop anxiety and suffer from depression. I truly felt alone and desperate. I felt I had a voice with no volume.

On visiting the Rape Crises Centre I encountered Ms Sheila Vereker and began my sessions of counselling. From my first day I began to feel an immediate sense of relief for the first time. My relief was given to me by being allowed to talk to someone for the first time about exactly what had occurred to me. This was a service that dealt with my main problem, my childhood abuse. To be able to speak to a person about how I felt about this and its effect on my life. I had encountered psychiatric services around this time but I now had a place and friends where the sole concern was to deal with facing the future as a victim and survivor.

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We have recently learnt that the Humbert Summer School in Co. Mayo is to honour victims of clerical abuse.

The Humbert Summer School will also give commemorative awards to journalist Mary Raftery who doesn’t figure in our book, and Sean Ryan who headed the long – running inquiry into church and state run schools and reformatories who at the present is in the Comptroller and Auditor General Report 2009 in relation to its cost to the taxpayer over several years.

It appears that John Cooney, Director of Humbert Summer School said “the honour will mark contributions of the Commission, the long hard campaign of survivors to have their testimonies believed”.

We would like to point out that my wife’s testimony has been edited in the Ryan Commissions Report.

We are dismayed and appalled that the Ryan Commissions Report concerning such serious matters, some of which may contain implicit allegations of abuse, could contain so many inaccuracies and misleading passages.

It is submitted that no conclusions could safely be drawn for any purposes in relation to the aforementioned and on the material on the Ryan Commissions Report.

When one looks at the present position in relation to the State and the Religious Orders including the Redress Board, the Ryan Commission and its Report and the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009.

It soon becomes clear that the Fianna Fail/Green Party Government who voted down the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009 has shown it is dominated by the Civil Service, has no political imagination or courage of its own and just drifting without direction.

Furthermore, the Fianna Fail/Green Party Government and the Religious Orders and the aforementioned overlook their failure to understand that they should be supporting the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009 on behalf of thousands of victims of institutional child abuse instead of patting each other on the back with the aforementioned awards.

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When one looks at the present position in relation to the Irish State and the Religious Orders including the Redress Board and the Ryan Commission Report and the cost to the taxpayer over the last 10 years.

It soon becomes clear that the Government has shown it is dominated by the Civil Service, has no political imagination or courage of its own and just drifting without direction.

Therefore, it’s quite clear that victims of institutional child abuse and their representatives should fully support the Labour Party’s Institutional Child Abuse Bill 2009.

The Bill sets out to deal with the following main areas.

· Expanding the definitions of ‘child’ and ‘institution’ so that no victim of abuse is denied justice through the Redress Board.
A small but substantial number of people were previously excluded from the Redress Board because of the wording in the 2002 Act. This change ensures that is no longer the case.

· The expanded definitions of ‘child’ and ‘institution’ in the Bill will necessitate a new time period for new applications to the Redress Board.
This recognises that victims of abuse who either lived abroad, or for whatever reason, were not aware of the Redress Board’s work, will have a second chance to apply. We propose that there will be a 3 year period for new applications once the Bill is passed.

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