PATSY McGARRY
FOLLOWING THE Ryan report “we all emerge . . . somewhat lost, unbalanced, the touchstone of our former beliefs and certainties cast adrift,” the Ombudsman and Information Commissioner Emily O’Reilly has said.
“We stood exposed, not as an island of charming saints and chatty, avuncular scholars but as a repressed, cold-hearted, fearful, smugly pious, sexually ignorant and vengeful race of self-styled Christians,” she said
She recalled that at the 2004 Céifin conference in Ennis, Co Clare, she had wondered “what the real us [her emphasis] actually was, the old-style pious Mass-goers, or the new-style materialists.” She continued, “I wonder even more so in the light of Ryan.”
Speaking at the Sisters of Charity Justice and the Downturn conference in Dublin, Ms O’Reilly said that after six years as ombudsman, she had come to the view “that public bodies and agencies begin to go bad when they begin to lose sight of why they are there in the first place”.
Following Ryan “‘we didn’t know’, is the constant refrain,” she said. “Certainly, very few knew of the systemic nature of the abuse, of the near unbelievable extent and depravity of the sexual abuse in particular; of the political, bureaucratic and clerical cover-ups – but no adult living in Ireland throughout the period in question did not, in broad terms, know.
“If things were hidden, they were hidden in clear sight: the crocodile lines of boys and girls that streamed out of the institutions; the certain knowledge that corporal punishment at the very least was practised therein; the incarcerated Magdalene women in their Madonna blues and whites who walked the open streets of towns and villages in church processions. Judges knew, lawyers knew, teachers knew, civil servants knew, childcare workers knew, gardaí knew. Not to know was not an option,” she said.
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