Child Abuse
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JUDGE Sean Ryan displayed serious annoyance and frustration with the lawyers representing the Christian Brothers at Wednesday's public hearing of the Investigation Committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, of which he is chairman.
He said he was uneasy to the point of suspicion as to the motives of the Christian Brothers in withholding questionnaires and statements made by the Brothers who worked in industrial schools where there was abuse.
The suspicion is by no means new to the rest of us, but to see it coming from Judge Ryan was a welcome development, as were his strong criticisms of the whole performance by the legal team for the Brothers and by Brother Seamus Nolan, who has been appearing as Christian Brother spokesman during public hearings.
Last May, he gave an undertaking that the documents would be given to the Commission. Now, legal privilege is apparently being claimed, though this was not absolutely clear.
It seemed also that what the lawyers knew was different from what Brother Nolan knew.
He had his own views on the documents and how useful they might, or might not, be but was not aware of the correspondence between the Christian Brothers and the Commission. Yet he is their spokesman! It was not surprising - indeed, it was welcome - to hear Judge Ryan describing the organisation's performance as "deliberately offensive".
These are gross delaying tactics.
The questionnaires and statements are probably as Brother Nolan described them, not containing "anything of great note".
They date from 2000, in the early days of the State's attempts to investigate abuse, a great deal of it believed to have taken place in Christian Brother institutions. Investigation so far has been disappointingly anodyne. We seem further from the truth than ever.
There is a soft centre to the inquiry. It is directed in public at Brothers and other witnesses from the Orders, while the abused are confined to private sessions or one-to-one hearings.
There is the fact that witnesses on behalf of the religious are answering most of the questions secondhand, at a remove from the appalling revelations that continue to emerge.
The scrutiny of their testimony is at best slack. The latest of the revelations are contained in the searing account by Peter Tyrrell in his posthumous memoir, 'Founded on Fear', and recently published. It takes the miserable story back in time into the late 1920s, demonstrating the terrible fixation on brutality that pervaded industrial schools.
Judge Ryan has also undertaken, rather belatedly, a potentially important investigation into the key question of finance. This has been given to an international company based in Paris called Mazars. I feel concern for their future credibility in the work they are doing.
Mazars' work is in the field of business advice involving 'forensic investigations'.
That is precisely what we have here. But do Mazars see it thus? They have an office in Dublin. The report is already in draft form.
If true, this is astonishing. It suggests that the following complex investigations have been carried out. Firstly, a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the Irish State's voted per-capita grants to the industrial schools and reformatories from the 1920s to the 1970s, together with an equally thorough investigation of the numbers of inmates, year on year, in each of the roughly 25 institutions involved.
The research resources for this 'forensic analysis' are indeed there, somewhere. But the records have not been found or submitted in full to the Commission on Child Abuse and anyone seeking them from scratch would need a major team of researchers. There has been no report of such investigation and no comment on progress in any of the many announcements from the Commission.
And there is another problem: while the institutions were paid what was essentially an adequate grant per inmate to cover physical protection, board and keep, good nourishing food, care of health and welfare with dental and optical attention - none of which happened - no records were kept.
Furthermore, the industrial schools used child labour to help in the earning capacities of each institution. Some of them, like Daingean, were highly rated as successful agricultural 'performers' in Offaly, making profits for the reformatory, profits that were earned by child labour. No accounting of this exists. It did not educate the children or provide them with better food or care. The testimony on this is huge and incontrovertible.
For Mazars to stand over the required report would be a miracle. Into the bargain, they are working with the religious but are not meeting the victims.
IN 1961 an Irish rural family, two adults, two children, father unemployed, would receive £2 2s 6d a week. There was a further payment of 13s 6d for the second child in the family, making the total for the four people £2 16s; (no payment was made for the first child). This meant 14s a week per person as subsistence.
The per-capita payment, at the same date, for a single child in an industrial school was £3 9s 9d a week. There were, in addition, block grants. What Mazars make of all this is going to be the next interesting discovery.
Paddy says: Write to the Editor - Irish Independent