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Ms Horsman-Hogan, the foundress of LOVE, (Let Our Voices Emerge) sinks to new lows with her gratuitous attack on journalist Bruce Arnold whilst simultaneously launching additional untruths about the industrial schools system (letters, January 10).
It's quite wrong of her to say that industrial schools were "no worse than children's' homes all over the world".
They were not "children's homes" anyway but places of detention for children, a reference to which is made in the Kennedy (1970) Report (p.135) under the sub-heading "Escapes" which reads, "Should any escape from the school occur, the manager shall, with as little delay as possible, notify the particulars to the nearest garda - Irish Police (station, to the garda superintendents of the county and adjoining counties, and to the inspector's office".On recapture and return to what Ms Horsman-Hogan now calls "children's homes" the retribution would be brutal and unmerciful.
Kennedy reveals too that during the life of her committee (which included a Christian Brother) they examined the child care systems of Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Austria -- a lesson indeed on the complete absence of any equivalence between care homes in those countries and what passed for "care" in this jurisdiction. In the preface to her subsequent report, and as if by extraordinary discovery, Kennedy wrote; "All children need love, care and security if they are to develop into full and mature persons... "More recently, in an official report on the Baltimore Fisheries School in west-Cork, which closed in 1950, Justice Mary Laffoy (2004) found levels of starvation, physical and sexual abuse so "harsh and depraved as to verge on the unbelievable".
Does Ms Horsman-Hogan really expect us to believe that such conditions were replicated at children's homes in Stockholm and Aarhus?
Another of the Foundress' jibes is that the State didn't pay enough to the Industrial Schools, whilst conveniently overlooking that, in addition to State capitation fees, the religious ran money-making concerns at the schools as well as raising cash "for the poor little orphans."
Although we are not holding our breath, we await the Ryan commission findings on this side to the "Children's Homes" scandals.
Ms Horsman Hogan poses a rhetorical question about the possible acceptability of the commission's final report demanding to know to whom it will not be acceptable.
Well, it may not be acceptable to the very great numbers who were promised in the commission to inquire into the Child Abuse Act (2000) that their complaints would be investigated, only to discover that that undertaking was essentially reversed on the passage of the commission to inquire into Child Abuse (Amendment) Act (2005).
Indeed over the past four years these concerns have been well documented at home and abroad.
Paddy says: Someone once told me that and Orphanage is a place of care while and Industrial School in a place of detention. I was sent to an Industrial School and served with an Order of Detention which can be viewed and printed off by clicking here