Child Abuse
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LOVE, (Let Our Voices Emerge) the charity set up to defend priests and nuns wrongly accused of abuse, will dissolve this Christmas.
Veteran campaigner Florence Horsman-Hogan, a paediatric nurse who founded the charity, said it was time for those who supported the religious orders through Let Our Voices Emerge to "move on with their lives".
"For us to carry on would be a waste of energy and resources," said Ms Hogan.
"We are now happy that our intervention in a sea of madness, driven by litigation and easy money, made a difference.
"We revealed that there were false and fraudulent allegations of abuse being made for financial gain or celebrity victim status."
Ms Hogan, a former industrial school pupil, has angered abuse victims because of her defence of religious orders in her reign as defender of brothers and nuns.
She has received threatening calls to her home in the past and claimed she was the victim of a smear campaign by former inmates of residential institutions.
Hogan formed Love to promote a positive image of religious orders in children's homes and to protect people falsely accused of abuse. She also claimed the State commission established to compensate abuse victims was vulnerable to fraudulent claims.
Abuse support groups rounded on Love after Hogan persuaded the Christian Brothers to release a statement denying that there had been systematic sexual abuse in residential institutions.
Hogan also claimed the child abuse commission was flawed and encouraged people who were not abused to seek compensation awards of up to €80,000 by accusing innocent members of religious orders.
Hogan caused another controversy after claiming that children held in industrial schools were genetically defective and programmed to become alcoholics, drug addicts and mental depressives.
I feel strongly that what Ms. Horsman-Hogan wrote was in the public interest as it made serious allegations about people who had been abused and also about media coverage of issues relating to abuse. Her writing was offensive and hurtful not just to me but to to all people who were abused while in the care of the State as well as to the many journalists who have written on the subject.
I shall not mourn the passing of L.O.V.E.