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The delinquent state that oppressed Irish children in institutional care is alive and well and is still denying justice to its former child victims. During his lifetime, one such victim, Peter Tyrrell, could not get justice in Ireland. He couldn't even get a hearing of his complaints. He took his life in despair after being betrayed by Ireland's bleeding-heart do-gooders in whom he had misplaced his trust.
Now that Peter has been safely dead nearly 40 years, Ireland's parasitic do-gooders are cashing in on his suffering. Peter's dreadful experiences can now be romanticised by Establishment Ireland and woven into Sean Ryan's myth of Ireland's "residential schools" and "child care system". The hypocrisy is nauseating.
Meanwhile, the living victims of Ireland's gulag (including myself) are being silenced by the state, the media and the do-gooders. It is just like the old times. A fraudulent and secret inquiry (the Ryan Commission on Child Abuse) and a secret hush-money court (the so-called Redress Board) are busily engaged in re-writing history.
If there is one thing worse than being oppressed, it is having one's history written by one's oppressors. For the sake of Ireland's children – past, present and future – that reprehensible project must not be allowed to succeed. Ireland's theocratic ruling elite is a prisoner of its history but it would do well to heed Santiana's warning that those who don't learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. An independent inquiry must be established to investigate the Irish gulag.
The former child prisoners could not get a public hearing at the Ryan commission. The tiny, unrepresentative handful of survivors that was selected for a hearing by the inquiry was heard behind closed doors. They were deemed unfit to be seen or heard by "respectable" Ireland – exactly as they were treated by the corrupt judges who illegally imprisoned them in childhood. Meanwhile, the commission gave everyone else a public platform from which to disseminate their misinformed opinions on the child prisoners.
Everyone, from Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to government minions to gulag jailors were given a chance to speak – everyone except the gulag victims. Even the likes of Colm O'Gorman (PD parliamentary candidate), who never set foot in a child prison, was given a public platform by Sean Ryan, the commission's chairman.
Ireland is not ready to listen to those whose lives it wilfully wrecked in the industrial reformatories. We, the former gulag children, will never get justice in Ireland. Our history will have to be published abroad. Perhaps in another 40 years, when we are all safely dead, we will suffer the same posthumous fate in Ireland as Peter Tyrrell.
Jim Beresford, Former Artane child prisoner, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire Email Jim Beresford