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

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.

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.

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”.

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

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

child abuse in Ireland is having positive impacts with the media,

politicians and maybe even those responsible for years of organised,

ongoing abuse.

The issue now appears to the be to achieve equity. One of the main ways

to achieve this is payment and amount of damages to be paid by those

responsible.

A settlement between Church and State, previously arrived at, is now,

at last seen by most as completely flawed, forcing politicians and

others in positions in power to backtrack on what they achieved in

their “Secret Deal”.

Can someone explain how the original amount was calculated in the above

mentioned document and if so, was the level of abuse known or fully

understood?

Did some civil servant sit in their office, making calculations on the

perceived value of a rape, a beating or even a death?

Did the rate for these vary, depending on the frequency of one of these

events?

Did the costs vary from institution to institution?

We can’t move forward or consider what the payment level should be

until it is known how the original figure was calculated.

In addition, we need to know the schedule of repayments agreed was

adhered to and honoured by the organisations responsible for this

immovable slur on Ireland.

If property was not handed over at the time of the agreement, then have

these religious authorities have gained value from the then increasing

values for property and land prices, possibly even to the extent of

removing much, if not most of the financial penalties they incurred for

their management of these “centres of pain”.

I know that whatever amount is finally agreed and extracted, can never

make up for each individuals pain and suffering.

It will also never account for the social, health and other economic

costs that have continued as a result of their actions.

Those that pay taxes pay are and will pay for the damage done, directly

or indirectly.

The State misused their position and the Church, through these

organisations abused the public donations, who by their support bought,

paid and maintained these centres.

Martin
See
Secret Deal Between Church and State