Feb

7

Ryan report scandal: Christian Brothers and others demand €40m

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Religious orders seek millions in legal costs

Conor McMorrow and Shane Coleman

THE religious orders criticised in the Ryan report into child abuse are demanding tens of millions of euro in legal fees for appearing before the inquiry.

While the orders are close to a final agreement with the government to make additional contributions of €100m plus properties to the redress scheme, the Sunday Tribune has learned that the Department of Finance has been notified that the orders have applied to have their massive legal bills arising from the Ryan inquiry covered by the taxpayer.

Given the central role of the orders in the inquiry, it is thought their legal costs could far exceed €40m.

The move has been slammed by Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny who said: “Just because it is legally correct does not make it morally justifiable.”

Kenny said: “If these reports are correct and the religious orders are seeking substantial legal costs from the Ryan Commission it is truly astonishing. At a time when the state is starved of cash, where vital services are left unfunded and ordinary families are being made pay ever more taxes, the idea that the people that created the need for the Ryan Commission are now going to seek their costs is unbelievable. Even if the legislation provides for this course of action just because it is legally correct does not make it morally justifiable.”

An estimate last year by the state’s financial watchdog, the Comptroller and Auditor General, said third party legal costs arising from the Ryan Commission could top €80m.

It is understood that the issue, including the final figure on the extra contributions to the redress scheme, may come before cabinet as early as this week. All government ministers have been circulated with a memo on the matter in recent days.

The Sunday Tribune understands that the final cash offer made by the religious orders tops €100m, along with major property transfers. This is on top of the €127m in cash and property they stumped up in the 2002 deal that limited their liability, and which was a fraction of what the final bill to the state will be. Estimates have put this cost at more than €1bn.

Any praise of the orders’ move to make further contributions is likely to be offset by the revelation that they have given the state a multi-million euro legal bill.

There was no one from the Ryan Commission available for comment when contacted but a well-placed source, close to the commission, said: “The commission is a completely independent body and the awarding of costs is a matter for the commission to deal with. I would be surprised if the religious orders or other parties did not seek their costs from the commission as they are entitled to under the legislation.”

Brother Edmund Garvey, spokesman for the Christian Brothers told the Sunday Tribune yesterday that he was not in a position to make a comment and no one from the Conference of Religious of Ireland was available for comment.

February 7, 2010
The Sunday Tribune.

Jan

11

Testimony of abuse victims ‘will not be destroyed’

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By Michael Brennan Political Correspondent

Monday January 11 2010

THE one million records of the Ryan Commission into child abuse have been saved — despite fears that they would be immediately destroyed.

The Government had sought advice from the Attorney General about reports that the commission was “leaning towards” the destruction of all documents used in preparing its report on child abuse in religious-run institutions.

But the commission has now given the Government assurances that no action will be taken on these documents for some time.

Its secretary Brenda McVeigh said work was currently ongoing to catalogue the one million paper records accumulated by its investigative committee over a nine-year period, which include witness statements by abuse victims.

“There was never a question of destroying the investigation committee documents,” she said.

The documents are now being preserved until the Ryan Commission meets (most likely later this year) to decide what to do with them.

Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe said: “The Government supports the desirability of preserving, in so far as possible, these records for posterity.”

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Oct

27

Reviewing the Ryan Report

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David Quinn
Issue 391, vol.98, Autumn 2009. Dublin Jesuits Journal.

The story of the Ryan Report does not begin in 1999 with Mary Raftery’s television documentary States of Fear. It begins three years before, with Louis Lentin’s documentary Dear Daughter, which told the story of Christine Buckley, who had been brought up by the Sisters of Mercy at Goldenbridge Orphanage.

Before this there had been books, such as The God Squad (1993) by Paddy Doyle, but it was Dear Daughter that really drew public attention in a major way to the issue of child abuse in institutions run by eighteen Catholic religious orders. This means that the issue of institutional abuse has now been part of the public consciousness for thirteen years.

The importance of Mary Raftery’s States of Fear is that it led to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s apology to victims of institutional abuse and also to the setting up of the Ryan Commission, which was originally headed by Justice Mary Laffoy. She later resigned, citing disagreements with the Department of Education. When Judge Sean Ryan became head of the Commission, he decided not to hear every single former resident who wished to be heard. Instead he would hear from a sample of 1,090 people. This would allow the Commission to finish its work within a fairly reasonable timeframe.

Public Hearings
I reported on the vast majority of public sittings of the Ryan Commission, while employed by the Irish Independent as its religious affairs correspondent. Ryan cut an impressive figure. He had the cool authoritative manner of an old-fashioned country GP. When former residents would become angry at what they were hearing, especially when the heads of the orders were giving testimony, he could almost always calm them down. When hearing evidence from the heads of the religious orders, Judge Ryan would always have about him an air of objectivity, without ever seeming to be detached from proceedings. In other words, he acted as a judge should act.

The public hearings were almost entirely dominated by the evidence of the religious orders. This is because the former residents were frequently naming names to the Commission. However, the vast majority of those being named had never been charged with an offence, let alone convicted of one. The former residents, therefore, had to be heard in private. The testimony of the religious orders was mostly very uniform. Each representative described conditions in which resources – both human and financial – were scarce. Generally, there were about thirty children for every adult. Nuns would sometimes go to bed with up to six babies in their room. There was very little time off. The regimes were based on discipline first and foremost. The institutions were run on military lines. The system was mostly impersonal.

Listening to the accounts of the various religious, I was reminded of the time I saw an old black and white film version of Jane Eyre. Eyre, of course, spends part of her childhood in an institution and in one scene we see her and the other girls being woken to the whistle, washing to the whistle, getting dressed to the whistle and marching down to breakfast to the whistle. Each child, as I recall, was also assigned a number.

The accounts also reminded me of a more recent film, Les Choristes (2004). It is set in France, just after World War II, and in an institution for boys run by lay people. The place is casually cruel and uncaring. It is assumed that the boys will overrun the school, given the slightest chance, and the emphasis is all on discipline. In one scene a teacher assumes another teacher is trying to abuse one of the boys. Nothing much is thought of this. It is only mildly frowned upon. In this school some of the teachers are more caring than others and the hero is obviously the one who founds the choir, which gives some of the boys a creative outlet that transforms them.

The total contrast between Les Choristes and films about institutional life in Ireland should be noted. Unlike those Irish films, it avoids sentimentality and is never melodramatic. Also, the sound of axes grinding cannot be heard.

The reports of Dr Anna McCabe were frequently mentioned in the testimony to the Ryan Commission. Dr McCabe was the person, in the middle of the last century, appointed by the Department of Education to inspect the schools. Some of her reports were critical. For example, one of them criticised serious shortcomings at Newtownforbes, an institution run by the Mercy Sisters, but a later report gave it a relatively clean bill of health.

The orders almost invariably expressed sorrow at some of the things that happened in their institutions. Also invariably, they reported a big increase in the number of abuse allegations they received following Bertie Ahern’s apology and the announcement that he was setting up a Redress Board, in addition to what become the Ryan Commission.

Why ‘Industrial’ Schools?The industrial school system was a legacy of the 19th century. It originated in Sweden, Switzerland and Germany and came to Ireland via Britain. In Britain such schools were often run by religious societies. Britain enjoyed a Protestant religious revival in the 19th century and Evangelicals were behind numerous legal reforms.

Some of those reforms were aimed at the care of children. Organisations like Barnardos and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children were founded in this era. The industrial schools were aimed specifically at ‘solving’ the problem of street children. Reports from the time say that some cities in England had hundreds, if not thousands, of vagrant children. Cities like London were growing rapidly and were often very overcrowded; tenements frequently had many large families living in one or two room flats.

Many city children quickly turned to crime as the only way they could find of keeping body and soul together (think the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist) and the common remedy was to put them in adult prisons. The industrial schools offered an alternative to this, a terrible alternative as it turns out. But the intent was to keep such children out of prison and off the streets, to feed and house them and train them for work when they left the schools – hence the name ‘industrial’ schools.

In Ireland, the religious orders ended up running the vast majority of industrial schools and orphanages. Irish Catholics feared the schools would otherwise be used to convert the children to Protestantism, and the religious offered a cheap alternative to lay staff, however poorly they might be paid.

Unfortunately, we now know that, even if the industrial schools were well run, they still would not have been fit places for children. Institutions never are, especially when they are under-staffed and under-funded. An institution can never provide a substitute for a loving family and that is an unavoidable and unalterable fact.

However, in many cases the institutions were appallingly run and physical, sexual and emotional abuses, as well as neglect, were commonplace. This is made abundantly clear by the Ryan Report.

The Ryan Report, of course, dominated the news headlines here for several weeks after its publication. The imprisonment of Frank Dunlop, the revelation of huge debts at Anglo-Irish Bank, and even the local and European elections only slightly distracted media and public attention from it. It also made headlines overseas: Al Jazeera covered it; a German newspaper reported that Ireland had run a series of ‘terror camps’ for children for years. No mention was made of the fact the Germany also had its industrial schools.

The Numbers
As mentioned, a total of 1,090 former residents of the institutions reported to the Ryan Commission. Between them, they named 800 alleged abusers in over 200 institutions. But there was very wide variation from institution to institution in terms of the amount of abuse taking place in each of them, something that the executive summary of the Ryan Report, which is what most journalists will have read, did not make clear. For example, fully 50 per cent of physical abuse reports and 64 per cent of the sex abuse reports heard by the Commission that involved boys, related to four of the boys institutions. The same applies to the girls’ institutions. Three schools account for almost 40 per cent of the physical abuse reports, or 48 reports each, while 19 schools had an average of 2.5 reports each.

Sexual abuse was also far worse in the boys’ institution than in the girls’, which is probably to be expected. In the girls’ institutions, sex abuse was normally perpetrated by outside workmen, or by visiting priests or religious, or by foster families, with whom the girls occasionally stayed.

A relative handful of individuals accounted for a disproportionate share of the complaints. For example: a total of 241 female religious were named as physical abusers. However, four of these were named by 125 witnesses, and 156 Sisters were named by one witness each. In total, of the 800 religious and others named as abusers, half were named by only one person.

It is also worth noting that an institution only received a special chapter in the Ryan Report if it was the subject of more than 20 complaints of abuse. Sixteen institutions, out of the dozens run by the orders, had more than 20 complaints made against them.

When I first reported the above figures in the Irish Catholic and the Irish Independent, I was accused by a handful of people (fewer than I had expected) of ‘playing the numbers game’. But surely numbers matter immensely? If they do not, then why did numbers feature so heavily in the Ryan Report and in the subsequent media coverage of it, and in the debates about it? In the North, for example, it is not immaterial whether 300 or 3,000 people died in the ‘Troubles’.

If I were a member of an order that ran those institutions that were relatively better run than some of the others, I would want people to know this. I would regard it as particularly unfair and unjust if every institution was universally regarded as being as terrible as the very worst of the institutions.

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Sep

23

Media coverage of Ryan report not objective, priest claims

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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

THE MEDIA has been criticised for being “clearly not objective” in coverage of the Ryan report on child abuse and of being “not at all interested” in the religious congregations’ side of the story.

The criticisms, made and reported by author, commentator and Redemptorist priest, Fr Tony Flannery, appear in his introduction to the book Responding to the Ryan Report (Columba), which he edited.

He writes that, on publication of the Ryan report: “I found myself getting more and more irritated by the majority of the media coverage . . . Too many of the regular media commentators were clearly not objective, but rather had obvious agendas of their own.”

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Jul

29

Deference towards Church ‘lost amid abuse scandals’

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28/07/2009

Children’s Minister Barry Andrews today insisted Irish people no longer have the deference towards the Catholic Church that allowed institutional child abuse to thrive for decades.

During emotional outbursts by abuse survivors at the launch of a Government plan to make sure the systemic torture can never again happen, Mr Andrews said there had been a sea change in society. “I believe that we have come a long way,” he said.

“The deference that was at the core of the problem is no longer there.”

The Children’s Minister blamed an undue high regard for religious institutions and the State for allowing a decades-long cover-up of sickening abuse in church-run homes, schools and orphanages since the 1940s.

While victims generally welcomed the Government plan, some insisted it was too little too late.

Survivor Bernadette Fahy, who works with the Aislinn Centre for addicts, demanded to know why many inspections of children’s institutions are still announced in advance.

She called for abuse survivors to be put on inspection groups because they would know best the subtleties of how abused children are manipulated and silenced.

“When visits were announced we were left scrubbing and cleaning for weeks before the visit, put in a little dress for the day of the visit, the table set beautifully, and as soon as the inspectors left it was back to the grind,” she said.

Mr Andrews insisted announced visits are needed in some cases to make sure children and staff are available to be interviewed by inspectors.

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Jul

29

Pain and struggle of survivors palpable as questions remain

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Pain and struggle of survivors palpable as questions remain

By Noel Baker

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

FINGERS were jabbed through the air, thick with recrimination and hurt – the only surprise is that for once the Government wasn’t the target.

Michael Waters, the grey-haired spokesman for Survivors of Child Abuse (Soca) UK, had spoken coherently and concisely about his experiences of social work and had questioned Children’s Minister Barry Andrews about plans to boost resources in the area.

Then, suddenly, he stood up and made his way onto the stage at the Government Press Centre.

He pointed first at the screens behind Mr Andrews and his two colleagues, and the words “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse”.

Then he turned his guns on John Kelly, sitting in the front row, the spokesman for SOCA Ireland.

“Mr Kelly, you boycotted this committee,” Mr Waters said. “You called it a toothless tiger.”

His ardour rising, he said if people had listened to Mr Kelly, little would have been achieved for survivors. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he said. “You are a coward.” There is little doubt that Mr Kelly strongly disagrees.

Maybe it was no surprise that emotions ran high yesterday.
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Jul

20

Four members of Ryan commission still on payroll

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PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

TWO MONTHS following publication of the Ryan commission report on May 20th, four members of that commission remain in situ, in unexplained circumstances.

All four are being paid fortnightly at department assistant secretary levels, between €150,000 and €160,000 annually.

Current estimates indicate that the overall cost of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, to give the Ryan commission its proper title, could be between €89 million and €99 million. By the end of 2008, that figure was €59.3 million, with further costs being estimated at between €30 million and €40 million.

The commission had six members, together with its chairman Mr Justice Seán Ryan.

Mr Justice Ryan took his seat at the High Court early in June. Commissioner Norah Gibbons formally resigned from her post on May 20th following publication of the report. However, her work with the commission’s confidential committee ended in March 2006 when she returned to Barnardos, the children’s agency, where she is a director. She has not received payment from the commission since then.

Prof Edward Tempany, a retired consultant paediatrician, had been appointed to the commission to help with its vaccine trials inquiry. This was discontinued in November 2003 following an action in the High Court, as was his work at the commission.
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Jul

8

Quinn calls for school to become a museum

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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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Jun

6

Ryan Report names innocent survivor of Abuse.

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BELOW IS THE EXTRACT FROM THE RYAN REPORT THAT NAMES AN INNOCENT PERSON/SURVIVOR AND GIVES BOTH THE FORENAME AND THE SURNAME OF THIS PERSON. WHILE THE PERPETRATORS OF THE MOST HEINOUS CRIMES AGAINST CHILDREN ARE PROTECTED BY PSEUDONYMS THE SAME ANONYMITY IS NOT AFFORDED TO A PERSON PUT INTO AN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL AS A BABY.

To protect the identity of this person, I’ve deleted anything that could identify her.

As one of many case-studies on this topic, consider **** who was committed to an Industrial School on 13th April 1935 by order of the District Court pursuant to the Children Act 1908. The reason given was that she was destitute.
The District Court directed that she remain within the Industrial School system until she reached the age of 16. Since her age at the time the order was made was 23 months, she spent 14 years of her life in Industrial Schools. In relation to the manner in which she was placed within the Industrial School system her major complaint is that in so doing the State criminalised her. She is of the view that she was charged, tried and convicted by a criminal court, which sentenced her to 14 years in prison (she was aged 23 months at the time of her committal). The words she uses in her various letters are that she was ‘charged,’ with being destitute, ‘found guilty’ and ‘sentenced to 14 years in one of Ireland’s penal institutions’. She has consulted the court records and they have reinforced her in this view. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has stated that she was not convicted of any offence and furthermore that she could not have been in view of her age and the fact that she was involved in care proceedings.
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