The religious orders were aided and abetted by a society in thrall to a punitive theology, writes BREDA O’BRIEN
A SINGLE sweet pressed into a child’s hand once a week during the rosary, which probably saved a girl’s sanity. A kindly old brother, with starving boys flocking around him, grateful for the bread he kept for them. A shopkeeper who broke the canes in his shop over his knee, and then told the astonished child who had been sent to buy them to tell the nuns they were out of stock. “The only boy from Gorey” remembering how his dreadful loneliness so far from home in Artane was lightened by one “brilliant” Brother. These, and other incidents, are like pin points of light in the otherwise unrelenting darkness of the Ryan commission report.
And like pin points of light, they only serve to emphasise the darkness. Small acts of kindness were treasured, and recounted years later, because they contrasted with the desperate bleakness of these children’s existences. Of course, there were larger kindnesses, too, such as nuns who provided emotional shelter for years for past pupils. But mostly it is a litany of cold, grey, bleak lives, where children had to contend not only with loss of family, often including siblings, but the fear of arbitrary, unfair punishment and constant hunger. Many carry literal scars, and are haunted by memories of sexual exploitation and degradation.
Continue reading »
