The Irish Times – Thursday, September 8, 2011

STEPHEN COLLINS, Political Editor, in Galway

THE LEGISLATION covering mandatory reporting of child abuse will not contain any reference to Confession, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter has said.

The Minister described the controversy over Confession as “an entirely bogus issue” and said he did not anticipate any reference to it in the Bill.

Mr Shatter was speaking to reporters during the Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting in Galway yesterday.

The issue of Confession arose in July after Mr Shatter published the heads of a Bill making it a criminal offence to withhold information relating to sexual abuse or other serious offences against a child or vulnerable adult.

Questioned by journalists at the time, Mr Shatter and Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald said there would be no exceptions to the rule, including information given to priests in Confession.

Asked yesterday if there would be a reference to the confessional in the full Bill, Mr Shatter said: “This is an entirely bogus issue. The focus of the Bill, the heads of which were published at the end of July, is to ensure that where there are what we describe as arrestable crimes, which include child sexual abuse committed against a child, and where an individual has material information that would assist the gardaí in the investigation of that crime, that they provide it to the gardaí, unless there is a reasonable excuse not to do so.”

He added that the context of the legislation is to ensure that those who know children are being abused inform the Garda; that those who are the abusers are brought to justice; and that other children are protected.

“The central focus of this Government and my colleague Frances Fitzgerald and myself is child welfare and child protection,” he said.

“And this [Confession] is an entire divergence from the central focus of what we’re seeking to address, and I think it would be helpful if those who are focusing on that issue focused to a far greater extent on the protection of children.”

Asked about the referendum on children’s rights, Ms Fitzgerald said the wording was currently with the Attorney General and she expected to see substantial progress in the next few weeks.

“We will then be looking at the wording and the Cabinet will decide on a date. At the moment we don’t have a date, but it remains a high priority for the Government once we have a wording agreed.”

The Minister said there had been some difficulties with the wordings which had been in the public arena and the Government wanted to get it right. “There have been some difficulties with those. But we are committed to wording along the lines originally proposed by the all-party constitutional committee on children,” she said.

18th July 2011

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Representatives of some of the 18 religious congregations that managed residential institutions for children investigated by the Ryan commission may not attend a meeting with the Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn next Friday in protest.

They have been invited to the meeting to discuss a €200 million shortfall in an expected 50:50 contribution by them to costs incurred by the State in compensating former residents of the institutions.

The Government is asking congregations named in the Ryan report to transfer ownership of schools to the State to help make up the shortfall.

Last week Mr Quinn said: “I’m asking them for a 50:50 contribution. The taxpayer has already paid out the bulk of it. Their share should be about €680 million and they are half shy of that . . . they need to do far more.”

The Irish Times has learned that the congregations never agreed to make a 50:50 contributions to such State costs, nor was this a recommendation of the report. It is also their intention to ensure that any additional contributions they make will go to survivors and not to the State.

Three of the larger congregations concerned, the Christian Brothers, the Sisters of Mercy and the Oblate Fathers, have ringfenced monies they intend to contribute to a proposed statutory fund for survivors.

Comments by Mr Quinn indicated that “the focus has gone off the survivors”, a well-placed congregations’ source said. “He is following a different agenda” and has “adopted an ideological position. We [the 18 congregations] are not a collective and we are not going to be treated as a collective. There isn’t even an agenda for the [Friday] meeting. We’re not going to be called in like that, to be lectured like that.”

Those who did attend would “go in, listen and say nothing. We certainly won’t be negotiating. The 2002 deal was negotiated. This one is not. We agreed a voluntary contribution and were told to do the best we can, and then in April 2010 we were told it wasn’t enough. Ruairí is no fool. He was minister for finance. He knows we’re not capable of contributing 50:50”.

The first the congregations heard about a 50:50 contribution was on April 15th, 2010, when they met then taoiseach Brian Cowen and ministers, the source said.

A press release afterwards said: “The Government view is that an ultimate outcome that reflects the conclusions in the Ryan report regarding the responsibility of the State and the religious congregations, and so resulted in the overall costs in responding to residential institutional abuse being shared on a 50:50 basis between the taxpayer and those responsible for the residential institutions, would be appropriate.” It continued that “the final cost of the response to residential institutional abuse is estimated to reach €1.36 billion. While the main element of that cost is the redress scheme, other costs include the cost of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the Education Finance Board.”

As the congregations’ source told The Irish Times that “at no point did the people present [at that April 15th, 2010, meeting] promise or commit themselves to paying 50/50”.

At that meeting “the overall cost of €1.36 billion was presented as covering the costs of the redress scheme and the Ryan commission and the Education Finance Board, a new body, details of which the congregations “do not possess”.

The source continued: “Congregations are, understandably, unclear as to why they should be held responsible for the costs of the Ryan commission, etc. They would appreciate being given the overall costs of the redress board itself as an entity.”

It was pointed out that at a Dáil public accounts committee meeting in July 2004, representatives of the congregations were told “the number of claims escalated from an anticipated 2,000 to 14,000”.

This was “despite warnings from the congregations and lawyers ([during negotiations for the 2002 deal)] that the nature of the scheme would inevitably attract many more. Yet, we, the religious are being held responsible for this miscalculation.”

It was also Government bodies that “decided that a contribution of £100 million punts (or €128 million euro) would be acceptable.”

This petition does not exist

Dear Sir,

Sunday September 19 2010

Your remarks of September 16 and yesterday concerning church authorities’ handling of child rape complaints give the impression that neither John Paul II nor yourself knew of how these complaints were being managed.

Can you please make clear exactly who has been running the church since 1979?

You have said church authorities did not act quickly or decisively in dealing with complaints. This is entirely dishonest.

In fact authorities acted extremely quickly and decisively, but in protection of priests and the church, not of children.

In your letter to Irish mass-goers you said the Irish hierarchy in transferring abusive priests had acted with “a well-intentioned desire to protect the reputation of the church”.

If there is now any such well-intentioned desire on your part then why have you not in outrage fired every employee of the church who contributed even in the remotest of ways, consciously or unconsciously, to the murder of Christ as made manifest in those children who were ravaged?

It looks extremely bad that you have not done so. And that you continue to set up lies and smoke-screens and treat us as if we are stupid.

Spokespeople on your behalf keep saying, falsely, that hierarchies acted independently of the Vatican, when countless pleading letters from bishops to the Vatican show that is not the case. As do the specific instructions issued by the Vatican in 1962 to all bishops for dealing with complaints of rape. Those instructions required the victim making complaints, as well as the cleric taking complaints, to sign an oath (the Brady oath) of silence under threat of excommunication.

Your letter of 2001 to all bishops confirms the 1962 instructions were in operation until 2001.

Why do you allow your representatives to lie?

Do you not deserve better from your employees?

We deserve better.

As long as the house of The Holy Spirit remains a haven for criminals, the church’s reputation will remain ruined.

The Holy Spirit deserves better.

Which reminds me. You have terrible PR people.

If I were you I’d give them the boot too.

Sinead

Sunday Independent

Survivors seek panel to investigate abuse

By Fiach Kelly Political Correspondent

Friday April 16 2010

SURVIVORS of abuse at psychiatric institutions yesterday demanded a truth commission be set up to investigate their claims that they were abused while in care.

At a protest outside Leinster House, the Templemore Forgotten Victims group was backed in their call by Reverend Kevin Annett, an international campaigner against clerical and institutional abuse.

The group was founded by Dr Rosaleen Rogers, who comes from the Tipperary town.

“I was detained as a teenager in Clonmel Mental Hospital,” Dr Rogers (65) said.

“At one point I weighed only four stone. I have not been able to keep food down for 40 years. I have not been able to get work because I have had to keep to a liquid diet — it has ruined my life.

“I have lost everything and I want a truth commission to establish the truth of what happened to me and others. I want to know who harmed me,” she said.

Vancouver-based campaigner Rev Annett added the same type of crimes had happened in Canada and the same kind of cover-up was going on.

- Fiach Kelly Political Correspondent

Irish Independent

The John Terry affair, like that of many other sportsmen before him, was sordid. Not only did he betray his wife and children, he also betrayed his team-mate and friend. He’s not the first footballer to behave badly, and expectations are not high when it comes to the off-pitch conduct of premiership stars.

Where it differed from the morass of adultery, dogging, domestic violence and drug-taking stories that have emerged about others in the past, is the masterful handling of the situation by England manager Fabio Capello. Showing true leadership, he demonstrated the consequences of his actions to Terry by stripping him of his captain’s armband. Higher standards are expected of people in positions of authority. You can’t lead a team while behaving treacherously to a team-mate. Loyalty and decency matter. Some things are just wrong and there is a price to be paid. Capello sent out this message loud and clear.

Morality, like ethics, standards and decency, has felt like a dirty word in recent years. The modern generation must tiptoe through a minefield of dilemmas where there are few certainties. But there have been revelations of such horror that collective judgement has been immediate and absolute.

Last year the contents of the Ryan report into child abuse in residential institutions shocked Irish society to its core. We struggled to find an adequate response as the scale and depth of systematic abuse of children emerged. The acts described in the report were of the most heinous nature – repeated rapes, constant humiliation, attempted destruction of children.

The publication of the report was a powerful moment of awakening. It forced the government to reexamine the contemptible deal struck with the religious orders that offered them indemnity against all legal claims on payment of €128m in cash and property. The arrangement, brokered in the final days of the government in 2002, was on behalf of 18 religious orders. Total liability later ran to €1.2bn.

When the disgusting detail of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse came out, the public clamour for more accountability from the religious orders grew to a crescendo. While initially resisting a reopening of the deal they later relented and agreed that it could after all be reopened.

The 18 orders that signed the indemnity deal with the State were the same orders who had tried their best to obstruct the compilation of the report. They are: Sisters of Mercy; Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul; Christian Brothers; Good Shepherd Sisters; Presentation Brothers; Rosminians; Oblates of Mary Immaculate; Hospitaller Order of St John of God; Sisters of Charity; Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge; Sisters of St Clare; Institute of St Louis; Presentation Sisters; De La Salle Brothers; Dominicans; Daughters of the Heart of Mary; Brothers of Charity and Sisters of Nazareth.

Last May the Conference of Religious in Ireland (Cori) said: “Cori supports the 18 congregations whose institutions were investigated by the Ryan report in their efforts to find the best and most appropriate ways forward. All of us accept with humility that massive mistakes were made and grave injustices were inflicted on very vulnerable children. No excuse can be offered for what has happened. The recommendations and conclusions of the Ryan report constitute an imperative for all those involved in the care of vulnerable people.”

Yet today we reveal that these same religious orders are seeking to have the State cover their legal costs for their obfuscation in its compilation. While they have been forced, kicking and dragging, to make adequate compensation for their crimes against children by handing over more property and cash to the state, this move will effectively claw back tens of millions of euro if they are allowed to succeed in their claim.

Enda Kenny is right when he says that just because it is legally correct it does not make it morally justifiable. Unfortunately morality and the Catholic Church in Ireland are not synonymous. Our expectations for the behaviour of the religious orders at whose hands generations of children suffered are very low.

Is it too much to expect that our religious leaders would know what the right thing to do is? The Christian Brothers and the Cori were unavailable for comment this weekend. We hope they are considering the morality of their position.

February 7, 2010
The Sunday Tribune Ireland.

The Irish Times – Wednesday, February 3, 2010
CARL O’BRIEN Chief Reporter

ABOUT 4,200 people with intellectual disabilities are living in outdated institutions or group homes which need to be closed down or replaced, a report commissioned for the Health Service Executive (HSE) is expected to conclude.

Officials familiar with the draft findings of a report on “congregated settings” say the process of providing proper community-based care facilities could take years and require substantial resources.

Of the people with intellectual disabilities living in institutional care, some 300 are residing inappropriately in psychiatric hospitals, even though they may not have a mental illness. A further 350 disabled people live in “de-designated” units, parts of psychiatric hospitals that were reclassified as community units about 20 years ago.

Latest international research indicates that the best outcomes for people with disabilities in residential care are for those living independently. However, the quality of support is considered crucial to avoid creating “mini institutions”.

Experts say the numbers still living in institutions in Ireland are out of step with most western European countries which have been shutting institutions for the past 30 years.

Prof Jim Mansell, the author of a major report on the future of residential care commissioned by the UK government, said institutions by their very nature deny people with disabilities their basic rights.

“In the US and Britain at the end of the 1960s and 1970s there was scandal after scandal associated with institutional care, such as concerns on overcrowding, ill-treatment and abuse and neglect … But if you provide the right kind of care in the community, you can transform the quality of people’s lives,” he said.

In a statement last night, the HSE said it was committed to increasing the provision of community-based care for people with disabilities and has been moving in that direction for several years. It said about 4,000 people are already in such settings.

Following the publication of the report on congregated settings, it says it plans to work closely with the Department of Health to finalise plans to increase the numbers of people with disabilities cared for in a community setting.”

Disability experts also say a major change in the culture of residential care is needed where residents are given the opportunity to be involved in the community and in decisions affecting them. Dr Fintan Sheerin, a lecturer in intellectual disability nursing at Trinity College Dublin, said many services need to move on from the “medical model”, which operates on the basis that there is something wrong with disabled people that requires treatment.

The Irish Times – Tuesday, January 12, 2010
PATSY McGARRY Religious Affairs Correspondent

LABOUR DUBLIN City councillor Mary Freehill has insisted that she has not called for the name of Archbishop Ryan Park, better known as Merrion Square in Dublin, to be changed.

She said yesterday that she had proposed a motion at a meeting of the city council on December 7th last inviting comments from people on the name of the park. Her motion was agreed and the council is to place advertisements in the media inviting such comments. She agreed she was prompted to propose the motion following findings of the Murphy report about Archbishop Dermot Ryan.

Archbishop of Dublin from 1972 to 1984, he transferred ownership of Merrion Square to the city in 1974. At one time the Catholic Church in Dublin had hoped to build a cathedral there. The issue of name change for Archbishop Ryan Park was discussed on Joe Duffy’s Spirit Level programme on RTÉ 1 last Sunday.

However, Ms Freehill felt the park might be more appropriately named after one of the many literary figures who had lived at Merrion Square.

She instanced Yeats, George Russell (AE), Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, as well as Daniel O’Connell.

The Murphy report was very critical of Archbishop Ryan. On abuse allegations, it found that he “failed to properly investigate complaints, among others, against Fr McNamee, Fr Maguire, Fr Ioannes, Fr X, Fr Septimus and Fr Carney. He also ignored the advice given by a psychiatrist in the case of Fr Moore . . . subsequently convicted of a serious assault on a young teenager”.

It found he had “a deliberate policy to ensure that knowledge of the problems was as restricted as possible. This resulted in a disastrous lack of co-ordination in responding to problems.”

His handling of the Fr McNamee case was “an example of how, throughout the 1970s, the church authorities were more concerned with the scandal that would be created by revealing Fr McNamee’s abuse rather than any concern for the abused”.

The archbishop “should have taken immediate action” when he received reports about Fr McNamee. That he “allowed him stay in Crumlin for a further 15 months was wrong”.

As for Fr Ioannes, “the handling of the initial complaint in 1974 was quite simply disastrous and typical of its time”. Parents alleging abuse of a son in 1974 spoke to a priest who wrote to the archbishop.

On the Fr Thomas Naughton case, the report found that church authorities, “particularly Bishop Murray, the Valleymount parish priest and archbishops Ryan and McNamara let down those families who, because they were good Catholics, trusted the church to do something about this man.”

It found the handling of allegations relating to Fr Bill Carney was “nothing short of catastrophic”. The archdiocese “was inept, self-serving and, for the best part of 10 years, displayed no obvious concern for the welfare of children”.

CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor

THE RYAN Commission Inquiry into the Abuse of Children in Institutions might not have been necessary if freedom of information legislation existed, according to Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly.

Speaking at a conference on the Freedom of Information Act organised by Public Affairs Ireland, she asked: “What might have been the outcome if 30 years ago, FoI legislation had allowed the public to rip away the secretive bureaucratic veils that hid the industrial schools and other institutions from clear view and exposed the practices therein?

“Leaving aside the abuse itself, a money trail might have uncovered the commercial exploitation of the children and the mismatch between State funding and the actual amounts parcelled out to the children by way of food, clothing and education.

“Other records would have revealed the complaints made and ignored, the low levels of educational attainment and other issues that took until the year 2009 to emerge into the daylight.”

She said the administration should draw very wide lessons from the Ryan report and consider how the Act could be improved. Referring to the exemption of the Garda, she pointed out that UK police were not exempted from the FoI legislation in that jurisdiction. “What harms have occurred in the UK as a result of
the police being subject to FoI?”

Michael Errity of the Department of Finance said FoI requests were costly to process, and in the current straitened financial circumstances Government departments would have to find ways of improving the FoI operation. This might include publishing more information outside FoI; using information technology to improve information management and reduce retrieval time and helping requesters to make their requests more specific.

Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes said sometimes an FoI request could be avoided by dealing directly with a requester and giving him or her the information sought.

Referring to data protection, he said keeping all of a person’s information on a single PPS number contained dangers both of unnecessary retrieval of information within State bodies, and of security leaks allowing for identity fraud. Keeping such information on one number was an outdated way of viewing efficiency, he said.

Colm Keena, Public Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times , appealed for more transparency from the courts. He said he was not able to get documents considered by the court when coming to judgments in cases which he had been covering in the court. All such documents, once opened in court, should be available as a right, he said.

While researching an article on Libertas leader Declan Ganley, he had discovered the existence of a court case in Massachusetts, he said, and by going online had been able to get a complete history of the case, a list of all the documents filed and see the documents, which were posted online.

Michelle Ní Longáin said in relation to exemptions from the FoI legislation, that where it related to decision making, a specific harm had to be identified.

Irish Times 19 June 2009

MARY MINIHAN

THE LABOUR Party has published a Private Members’ Bill that would cater for victims of abuse previously excluded from compensation by the Residential Institutions Redress Board.

The party’s education spokesman Ruairí Quinn said that some people had “very legitimate reasons” for missing the deadline for applications for redress.

“This issue has particularly been raised with us by groups in Britain who represent people who simply did not know about the existence of the redress board or who were simply too ill or traumatised to be able to apply,” Mr Quinn said. He added that some people were excluded because they were abused in institutions which were not listed in the schedule to the Redress Act.

He said others had been refused redress because they were underage under the law as it stood at the time they were in institutions.

“They would not be considered to be underage in modern law,” he said.

Mr Quinn said the Institutional Child Abuse Bill also dealt with the concerns of some victims of abuse that they had a criminal record by virtue of having been committed to an institution.

“The Bill proposes that those persons must be treated for all purposes in law as persons who have not committed or been charged with or prosecuted for or convicted of or sentenced for any offence,” he said.

“Their records will, in other words, be wiped clean.”

He said applicants to the redress board were prohibited from publishing any information concerning an application or award that referred to another person or institution by name or could lead to identification.

“This effectively prohibited applicants from recounting the stories of their childhood,” Mr Quinn said.

He said the Bill would delete this section of the Redress Act.

Mr Quinn said he had heard reports “that both the redress board and the Child Abuse Commission may be considering the destruction of documents they hold relating to the testimony or witnesses or other papers”.

He said that the records must be maintained and must be accessible.

“To destroy these documents would add insult to injury for those who suffered abuse.”

Mr Quinn said the Labour Party had limited Private Members’ Time during which the Bill might be debated in the Dáil.

“We would be very happy for the Government to take over the Bill and to have it enacted in Government time. This would be the speediest and most effective way to proceed.”

Irish Times 19 June 2009