We need to shed our certainty that all this abuse can be blamed on aberrant religious, writes BREDA O’BRIEN
IT IS fascinating to read the ISPCC’s press release on the Ryan report. It attempts to explain the background to the “cruelty men” and its role in committing children to industrial schools.
“The societal, economic, environmental, and personal limitations within which parents were attempting to raise their children . . . included abject poverty, substandard housing, lack of employment, poor sanitation, absentee fathers, excessive use of alcohol, and the condemnation and unacceptability of illegitimacy. It was these factors which led to the vast majority of referrals to the society’s inspectors coming from the general public, including the families themselves, and it was these factors that often meant leaving a child in the home environment was not an option.”
What would the reaction have been if any representative of a religious order had issued a similar statement this week? No doubt they would have been tarred and feathered. Yet no such reaction has greeted the ISPCC’s statement.
The Ryan report mentions that Frank Duff, the founder of the Legion of Mary, and a critic of industrials schools, referred to one woman ISPCC inspector who was “dangerous” and who was “shovelling children into industrial schools”. Virtually all the inspectors were male, so it should be relatively easy to find and name this woman. There is no interest in doing so, in stark contrast to the religious who have been named in recent days.
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