In the Irish gulags abusers roamed free because children didn’t matter
By Fergus Finlay
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
I DROVE to Clonmel on Sunday for the finals of an under-nines and under-10s football tournament. It was organised by Clonmel FC and brought together young footballers from the six Munster counties. They (and the rest of us) had a brilliant afternoon and we were made to feel really welcome by the Clonmel team.
“Kids for kids” is the slogan of this invitational tournament, and it raises money for the work we do in Barnardos. It’s a great idea that, isn’t it – kids enjoying their sport, really having a go at competition, learning a bit about themselves in the process and raising a few bob for other kids along the way.
All the clubs that took part have wonderful youth policies and they’re all staffed (if that’s the word) by dedicated volunteers – coaches and parents, and people who’ve given their lives to their clubs and the kids they work with, year in and year out.
Looking at the kids playing, each of them able to imagine a bright future as the next Roy Keane or Damien Duff, and watching the pride and joy of their parents and coaches, you could almost forget for a moment the darkness that unfolded across our country last week.
But in some ways the contrast between the happy-go-lucky kids I met on Sunday and the tortured, hunted children I’ve been reading about all week made it even more painful.
I don’t feel I have the right to speak for the survivors of institutional abuse in Ireland. I’ve met many of them over the years and I’m in awe of their courage and determination.
The anger of people like Christine Buckley and John Kelly, even today in the wake of their total vindication, is both palpable and entirely justified. Theirs is the authentic voice of reproach to a system that betrayed them and left them in hell.
And yet I do believe the rest of us have an obligation to try to analyse this and to see what sense, if any, can be made of it. I heard someone on radio say the other day that everyone over 50 in Ireland shares some portion of the blame for what happened.
I’m not sure if I agree with that – but I do keep asking myself the same question: if I had known, would I have tried to stop it? Because there is one conclusion that I believe has to be faced up to after you finish reading the report of the commission, and it is this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is no cliché; it is the most profound point of the entire history of institutional care in Ireland. The torture and degradation of generations of children was not the work of bad apples. It was the result of a corrupt system. The failure to stop it was not the result of oversight or mistake. It was part of the same corruption.
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