What’s past is present… more on Christian solidarity May 21, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, Social Policy.trackback
There’s little to add to what has already been said about the abuse in Catholic state supported institutions during the last century – and for a distressing precis this article is hard to better. During almost the entirety of the last century. The entirety of the last century. Including the greater portion of my adult life for claims dating from 2000 were made, and from that during most of us reading these reports at least a portion of our adult lives. So this isn’t ancient history. Many of those who had this inflicted upon them are still alive, some of those who perpetrated it are also alive.
What happened is difficult to comprehend.
1. Physical and emotional abuse and neglect were features of the institutions. Sexual abuse
occurred in many of them, particularly boys’ institutions. Schools were run in a severe,
regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and
even on staff.
How it was allowed to happen is even more so…
2. The deferential and submissive attitude of the Department of Education towards the
Congregations compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and
monitoring of the schools. The Reformatory and Industrial Schools Section of the
Department was accorded a low status within the Department and generally saw itself as
facilitating the Congregations and the Resident Managers.
The Irish Times today refers to these as ‘State’ schools, and while it is true that the State was involved in no sense were these ‘State schools’. Instead they were contracted out to the religious who… well note this:
3. The capital and financial commitment made by the religious Congregations was a major
factor in prolonging the system of institutional care of children in the State. From the mid
1920s in England, smaller more family-like settings were established and they were seen
as providing a better standard of care for children in need. In Ireland, however, the
Industrial School system thrived.
But lest that sound like a bid to distance the State from its responsibilities it’s not intended to be. The State failed on every measure you might seek to use in the discharge of its duty of care and its responsibility to children. The State was perfectly comfortable to hand off to the religious.
Even where there was State oversight it was minimal…“The Inspector rarely spoke to the children in the institutions.”
No effort was made to adhere to their own guidelines.
9. The Rules and Regulations governing the use of corporal punishment were disregarded
with the knowledge of the Department of Education.
The legislation and the Department of Education guidelines were unambiguous in the restrictions
placed on corporal punishment. These limits however, were not observed in any of the schools
investigated. Complaints of physical abuse were frequent enough for the Department of Education
to be aware that they referred to more than acts of sporadic violence by some individuals. The
Department knew that violence and beatings were endemic within the system itself.
And as if this travesty of ‘care’ were not appalling enough…
18. Sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions. The situation in girls’ institutions was
different. Although girls were subjected to predatory sexual abuse by male employees or
visitors or in outside placements, sexual abuse was not systemic in girls’ schools.19. It is impossible to determine the full extent of sexual abuse committed in boys’ schools.
The schools investigated revealed a substantial level of sexual abuse of boys in care that
extended over a range from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence.
Perpetrators of abuse were able to operate undetected for long periods at the core of
institutions.20. Cases of sexual abuse were managed with a view to minimising the risk of public
disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation. This policy
resulted in the protection of the perpetrator. When lay people were discovered to have
sexually abused, they were generally reported to the Gardai. When a member of a
Congregation was found to be abusing, it was dealt with internally and was not reported
to the Gardaıę.
The damage to the children affected and the danger to others were disregarded. The difference
in treatment of lay and religious abusers points to an awareness on the part of Congregational
authorities of the seriousness of the offence, yet there was a reluctance to confront religious who
offended in this way. The desire to protect the reputation of the Congregation and institution was
paramount. Congregations asserted that knowledge of sexual abuse was not available in society at the time and that it was seen as a moral failing on the part of the Brother or priest. This
assertion, however, ignores the fact that sexual abuse of children was a criminal offence.30. The Department of Education dealt inadequately with complaints about sexual abuse.
These complaints were generally dismissed or ignored. A full investigation of the extent of
the abuse should have been carried out in all cases.
All such complaints should have been directed to the Gardai for investigation.
The Department, however, gave the impression that it had a function in relation to investigating
allegations of abuse but actually failed to do so and delayed the involvement of the proper
authority. The Department neglected to advise parents and complainants appropriately of the
limitations of their role in respect of these complaints.
What is this other than a level of abuse and rape that borders on the industrial, the scale of which is so great as to give the lie to all the cosy little rhetoric about a ‘very conservative’ Ireland as if that were something to be proud of.
This, conservatism writ large, the subcontracting of the instruments of social policy by the state to non state institutions and the subsequent and absolute complicity of the State in protecting people whose raison d’etre appears to have been to torture those who were completely defenceless, those who – in the main – came from social brackets which were in our Republic unprotected, unloved, unwanted. And which in some respects remain so.
And a State which was run, apparently, almost for the convenience of child abusers who could call upon the sanctuary of institutions that defied that State – when it was necessary, which appears to have been hardly ever.
I could go on about the utter hypocrisy of those who in the name of such conservatism preached a public morality which was policed in a near totalitarian way while protecting those who breached that morality in an egregious and continual basis. I could go on about the societal dislocation incurred by a near sociopathic concentration on supposed ‘life’ issues while this torture was being committed under the eyes of those who were most vociferous. I could go about those who continue to say such things.
But what’s the point? We’re told we’re a ‘very conservative’ people. As if that is that.
But read the accounts in the report proper [the points above are taken from the overview available as a PDF at the Irish Times] and you can see what were literally lives lived in hell for children, and time again the expression that they had no way of articulating this, for who would believe them when the forces of State and Church were ranged against them?
Visitors…do-gooders would come, the ladies with the cars and the furs would come.
She…foster mother …got all the clothes from the pawn…(shop)… and all the stuff would
be home out of the pawn and would be laid out and then they went back again when
they left…In those days of course you didn’t have a voice, nobody thought you had a
brain even.
Perhaps it is time that particular nostrum about being “conservative” was examined for what it truly means.
Finally, perhaps the most upsetting aspect is paradoxically not the raw horror of the abuses themselves but the “Positive memories and experiences of male and female witnesses”.
Kind staff
Two hundred and eighty four (284) witnesses, 168 male and 116 female, recounted the
kindness of individual religious and lay staff. The witness description most often reported was
the absence of physical abuse, ‘He did not hit’ and ‘she didn’t hit girls or scream at them’ were
typical of remarks by witnesses regarding kind members of the religious staff. Other acts of
kindness by religious and lay staff reported to the Committee included being given extra food,
spoken to kindly, shown affection, having a blind eye turned to behaviour others would report,
creating a positive environment and being called by one’s first name rather than by a number or
surname. Another kindness was being allowed to have pets particularly cats and dogs as
occasionally reported. Other witnesses commented on the special attention they received from
individual staff that continued over a number of years and was of lasting benefit.
Very upsetting reading.
In regards to modern times, weren’t there been complaints about
how mental patients are been treated in the 1990s? Perhaps
this should be investigated as well.
It does seem to be systemic in terms of an approach to such areas on the part of state and Church… The most awful aspect of this is the fact that those were childrens and young adults lives just put into a blender… years blighted. And no way to get out of it.
The Christian Brother on Primetime tonight looked like he was on the verge of tears. Barry Andrews, our ‘Minister for Children’ (!) was shamelessly unrepentant about the state’s sweetheart deal with the orders, and smugly patronising into the bargain.
What do we conclude from that?
I’ve just been sick the last two days thinking about this.
Much of the coverage over the past few days has talked about industrial schools in remote places such as Letterfrack and Daingean, but they weren’t all hidden away: Artane and Whitehall in Dublin, and, in Galway city, right on the lower Salthill Rd, was St. Josephs Industrial School for senior boys. I lived in Galway from 1968-74, from the ages of 7 -14, and I remember you could look over the walls and into the fields behind that establishment from the ‘new’ road from White Strand to Salthill. We, in our Jez blazers, on our way out to play football, or hang out in the amusements, would see kids in cut down suits, barefoot, working in those fields on cold winter evenings, kids no older than us. Even then, we knew they were fearful horrible places – everyone knew. We weren’t quite sure what you had to do to deserve to go there though.
It’s really quite difficult to discuss these issues fully. We know that the children in institutions were severely abused. We know that their plight was ignored and that the Church, the Gardai and the government failed these kids. What bugs me is that while its clear that the children discussed in this report were severely abused even by the standards of the day, the Irish society in which the abuse happened was quite tolerant of abusive behaviour toward children.
Beatings were common in schools and homes. I’ll always recall the utter horror I felt when a teacher of mine told my class about how when he went to school, his father would tell the ‘master’ to give his son “plenty of stick”. His father would ask him if he received any beatings after school each day and if he stated that he had, his father would then beat him with a stick as well.
I would not hesitate to call such treatment abuse, but the reason so many seem to refuse to call it such is because it was in no way unusual. In a society where beating a child was considered an essential part of parenting and educating, it’s easy to see how these schools were tolerated and encouraged. It’s not an aspect of the issue that comes up for discussion though, partly because it places generations against each other.
Make no mistake, things have changed for the better over the years, but I wonder if perhaps future generations will look at the way we currently treat people with intellectual disabilties, those suffering from mental illnesses and the elderly in the way we now look at the way that the state treated its most vulnerable in the past?
Just a small detail to add to the recollection above: the kids I remember seeing over the wall of St. Josephs also had their hair closely cropped….. a small thing, but this was the late ’60s when long-ish hair was the norm, so a crop was one more clear way of separating these boys off. And, of course, of asserting their status as criminals.
Niall,
You’re absolutely right of course: in the supposedly ‘posh’ Jesuit school i attended in Galway, we were beaten with leather straps regularly in primary school. It was, generally, speaking a lot worse and a lot more indiscriminate in the Brothers.
One thing that needs to be hammered home is this: Catholic orders also ran institutions in Britain and in the North, and while these places may not have been holiday camps, nothing like the scale of abuse that happened here appears to have occurred: a fact that must be attributed to proper inspection procedures from a state that did not automatically defer to a collar. Indeed, it is notable that in other parts of the world where this kind of abuse did occur, -Australia, Quebec, Boston- there were two common features: Irish priests, brothers and nuns, and a largely Catholic political and administrative class.
“What bugs me is that while its clear that the children discussed in this report were severely abused even by the standards of the day, the Irish society in which the abuse happened was quite tolerant of abusive behaviour toward children.”
Quite so. The savage who ran the primary school I went to in Galway the early 70s regularly slapped pupils in the face/across the head, or grabbed their ears and twisted hard when they didn’t answer fast enough. I still remember getting caned across the hands with a bamboo switch
There is clear evidence of widespread criminality. Yet the criminals have been allowed go free, thus compounding the atrocity. The Catholic church in Ireland is a criminal institution. The perpetrators of these horrific crimes are still, with state and societal complicity, in charge of the education of children.
Lenihan has been touring European state capitals to reassure capitalists and money lenders that Ireland is a good place to do business. The international press today is full of these horrific crimes of state and religion against children. And a puzzlement that there is no retribution, no justice. Why would any sane person want to rear children in such a backward society?
“The Catholic church in Ireland is a criminal institution.”
Given that various government departments/services and the Gardai were also involved in covering up these crimes, would you also consider these institutions criminal? Just wondering.
Eammon, sonofstan, would either of you ever consider making any sort of complaint to the Gardai or department of education regarding these abusive teachers? If not, would it make a difference if these teachers were still working in the same schools? What of parents who used similar abusive methods to ‘discipline’ their children? Even if you would not complain, how would you feel about somebody who had similar experiences making an official complaint?
Sorry for all of the questions, but I’m trying to get my head around how people have reconciled their outrage at what happened in industrial schools and similar institutions with their acceptance of abuse in other places.
We scratch our heads when we look at the way society accepted the abuse that happened in the schools mentioned in the above report, but at the same time we seem to have no desire to discuss the suffering and abuse that happened in other places on a more widespread basis, even at a time like this when to an outsider it would seem that this would be the next step in investigating the abuses of Ireland’s past. We seem to just accept that this happened and shrug our shoulders, then we thank the gods that something like what happened in Letterfrack or Artane could never happen in these times.
I think there’s a lot in what you say Niall. Just as during the time period covered in the report there was a wish to ignore it on the part of the general populace -or at best to say, well everything is fine, it’s being looked after- it is true that other societal abuses occur in situations where the vulnerable are. Someone was asking me whether it was celibacy, or whatever, but I think it’s simpler and in a way more worrying than that (however much that might have contributed further to the problem, as did profound societal hypocrisy). Almost unlimited power with no oversight.
I think there are two separate issues here. Corporal punishment was routine in schools in Britain as well as Ireland, in living memory; that didn’t go until quite recently, although when it did go it went quickly. (The cane was an everyday reality at the school I went to in 1968, and a jokey myth at the school I was at in 1973.) And it’s true that the ‘Christian’ Brothers seem to have taken that side of the job particularly seriously, and to have been well behind the curve in giving it up.
But what sonofstan describes is a different order of horror. (“barefoot, working in those fields on cold winter evenings”? Barefoot?) And, like WbS, I find that “Positive memories” paragraph hard to read – when recalling ‘kind’ staff’, “the witness description most often reported was the absence of physical abuse”.
Oh my. Those poor children.
Yes, power and lots of it. It was one big Stanford Prison Experiment – the difference being that the extra power differential conferred by the homes was overlaid onto that existing disciplinary mindset, which found it quite normal to hit a child’s hand with a leather strap for talking back.
WBS,
Mary Raftery gives the same answer as you to the question of how the appalling situation developed: absolute power. On top of that was the factor mentioned by Niall : this was a country which not just tolerated but (as Kevin Myers put it) believed in violence. As Niall put it, parents too wantonly administered violence to their children. This does no in any way minimise the responsibility of those who oversaw systemic torture and enslavedment of children, but it may help explain how that system survived.
The Irish state too seems to be a peculiarly supine animal, certainly throughout the period of the worst abuses. Yes the clergy had power, but the indifference and evasion in government departments seems not to be wholly driven by fear of clerical reaction. Instead, to me at least, there is a sense of beaurocratic cowardice.
There seems to be a multitude of factors but by far the most significant has to be the extraordinary power which the Catholic clergy wielded. They were beyond reach and simply answerable to know one.
But since the cruelty and abuse was so widespread and systemic it seems extraordinary that so many among the religious could find this behaviour consitent with their faith. Given the numbers involved and that these people had supposedly given their lives to God, what does this say about the value of the Gospel or Christian values?
It’s funny what memory does….. all my recollections of St, Josephs seem to boil down to one glimpse over the wall, and yet it was always there, and the road past it was one I would have walked or cycled frequently.
What i find hard to grasp now, at a remove of nearly 40 years, is how we understood that, at the end of a long chain of possible consequences for ‘being bold’, there was incarceration: I don’t specifically remember being threatened with ‘industrial school’, but the threat doesn’t sound unfamiliar – I know other kids were, whether jokingly or not.
It’s trivial in comparison with what those in the schools suffered of course, but the very fact that all our childhoods were, to some extent, lived under threat of such a unimaginable sanction, does demonstrate, I think, that as Niall is arguing, it was a continuum, and not two different orders – ‘normal’ happy children outside the walls, horror within….
What interests me about this is the political dimension to it and the implications for how we understand the Irish state. From what I can see since independence there have been two broad threats to the stability of the state, in the eyes of those who controlled it. Firstly, republicans of various stripes. The second group were those who transgressed the sexual mores of the time and children who went into these institutions. The first group gave the state a good fight and were reasonably able to stand up for themselves despite internment, special criminal court, harassment, and all the methods the state used to suppress them. The second group, children in these institutions, had no means to strike back at the state and its agent the Church and religious institutions. In my eyes these children were ‘dissidents’ on a par with the Eastern Europe groups before 1989. While many in the old Soviet Bloc never experienced Stalinist ‘terror’, likewise here in the ‘liberal-democratic’ Republic of Ireland most never experienced clerical ‘terror’. I think there are disturbing parallels here. Disturbing, that is, for those who blithely and unreflectively believe that we were a liberal democracy or a ‘free’ country. All the mainstream political parties buttressed these practices, and they can’t be exempted from the blame and guilt that needs to be apportioned now, in the light of what this report reveals.
Listening to Colm O’Gorman on Drivetime yesterday a paricularly distressing element of this scandal was the extent to which poor, neglected children were an economic resource to be exploited by the religious orders. That the capitation grants from the state were higher than contemporary unemployment rates and yet the children were underfed and neglected. This abuse of children and exploitation of them was a seriously profitable activity for the religious and that aspect deserves to be more fully explored.
Personally I think they all the congregations should disband now and their members should become extreme mendicant orders. The state should seize their assets and property. They have no function is Irish society.
Another thing that is missing from this analysis is the degree of harm these practices have on our society.
First off, it is almost certain that the abuses were not confined to residential institutions and many many pubils of regular schools where subject to physical abuse and sexual abuse.
So what this means is that there is a large proportion of the population of this country that has suffered abuse as a child. This includes a considerable number of people in powerful positions, moreso since they would normall be more represented by the older people.
It is not too much of a leap to conclude that many of thses people are mentally damaged in some way and that this damage is reflected in their decisions regarding the state.
Not only that, although there has been a large degree of focus on the perpetrators of the crimes, there is a strong chance that many of the civil servants and Gardai that aided the concealment of the crimes are still in senior positions in the police force and Department of Education and even where they are not there is no indication that the culture of these bureacracies has been reformed.
In many ways dealing with the religious is an easy response, but in reality they have no credibility in this country and it should only be a matter of time before they fade away.
These deeper issues regarding the trauma on our society have to be dealt with in public and urgently.
In many ways dealing with the religious is an easy response, but in reality they have no credibility in this country and it should only be a matter of time before they fade away.
Yeah, i was thinking that: the debate seems to have moved on today to concentrate on the issue of Woodsie’s D.I.Y. compensation deal with the religious, as if sorting this out will fix it.
And as regard regular schools….. due to my father’s job, we moved around a lot when i was a kid, so I went to 4 different secondary schools: one of these was a VEC run institution, the others were all religious run boys day schools in different towns. In each of those three, there was (at least) one priest or brother about whom one was warned, as a new arrival, not to be alone with. I could still name them. In two of the cases, in fact they weren’t ogres, they were the guys who ran extra-curricular stuff, the ‘cool’ ones.
This was in the late 60s/ early to mid 70s and I would be willing to bet that most men of my age and over who were at school then could tell the same story. Relatively few may have experienced sexual abuse, but the sense that it was there, waiting, and the knowledge that it had happened was always there.
CMK makes a very good point about how this vitiates our claims to being a functioning democracy, then (or now?)
The brutality and sadism described in the report turns the stomach just as much as it did when these stories started coming out first. In fact it’s worse, because the report shows how huge it was in scale, how systemic it was, and how complicit some professions and the wider society were in it. (Also I have children now, which I didn’t have when ‘States of Fear’ was shown, and the agony of the parents strikes me now, as well as the indescribable fear of the children. My mother tells me that on Sundays in the 40s and 50s the mothers of the children locked up in the Glencree Reformatory would get a bus from Dublin to Whitechurch and walk over the Featherbeds and back to see their children. If you don’t know it, it’s a very long and bleak trek over a boggy mountaintop.)
As CMK says, it all tells us a lot about the state and the location of power within it. But it didn’t spring into existence in 1921, as some of the commentary seems to suggest. Most of the larger institutions were founded well before Independence, and the UK state funded the Catholic church to run them. The laws under which children were convicted were also pre-Independence. What seems to have happened in 1921 was that state officials stopped any kind of meaningful surveillance of the institutions, perhaps because those officials had been exclusively educated and indoctrinated by the same church (which, incidentally had been given de facto control of much of the state primary school system before 1921 also). That’s some serious hegemony.
Taking a much longer view, the incarceration of women and children for begging or simply wandering seems to have come late to Ireland. Workhouses were established in the 1840s, and the industrial schools/reformatories in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Europe, the process began properly in the middle of the seventeenth century (Foucalt’s ‘Grand Renfermement’), where vagrants were put to forced work in huge prison-like buildings. Maybe Ireland went through similar processes as elsewhere, but delayed.
One other thing occurs to me – workhouses and social prisons like these institutions were originally urban. Maybe I’m wrong, but I get the impression from the coverage of the last ten years or so that the majority of the children committed were from Dublin and other large towns. Independent Ireland was an overwhelmingly rural society, and there was frequently a strong sense that city life was evil. Perhaps the cruelty of treatment (which is the most difficult thing to explain) might have something to do with this?
FPL, I don’t disagree with you at all. I think it is true that this has proliferated through society and in some respects the attitudes are merely the tip of the iceberg… But I hope that I make it implicit in terms of talking about how ‘conservative’ values are supposedly normalised.
Bartholemew, I know precisely what you mean about how changes in your own life change your perception of these matters. And then there’s the issue of people you meet who’ve been affected directly by it as well. The urban/rural divide is an interesting thought.
Forget “conservatism,” please. It has, operationally, de facto, been Godless and thus irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God they are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
”[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It .is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
Never come across the Irish variant I take it?
@WorldbyStorm. Your point is taken. Isn’t it interesting that Ireland’s first State run, non-denominational schools is called “Scoil Cholm”?
My wife, a primary school teacher, pointed out the absurdity of calling a non-denominational, state run school after a Catholic Irish saint.
Isn’t it also ironic that this “non-denominational” school would be “officially opened” a month before the end of the school year, but two days after the child abuse report.
This was in the late 60s/ early to mid 70s and I would be willing to bet that most men of my age and over who were at school then could tell the same story. Relatively few may have experienced sexual abuse, but the sense that it was there, waiting, and the knowledge that it had happened was always there.
I’m probably one of the youngest people on this thread, but I can attest to similar knowledge among the pupils of which Brothers were widely known as gropers, even as recently as the early Nineties. I am very glad that to have been from a later generation than the savage beatings doled out to my parents and grandparents…
“The Inspector rarely spoke to the children in the institutions.”
I was put into care when I was 2 years old I was with the mercy in Kerry until the age of 10 when I was taken to St .Josephs Industrial school in Tralee ,the next four years were so bad I still have nightmares and am fighting to stay alive
After Tralee I ended up in Artain
My crime was, my parents were too poor to look after me and my older brother and sister
I all the years I was in these schools I was never aware that an inspector came to the school.
These were criminal acts and the state with the help of Michael Woods helped these criminals get away with Murder
Some of us are just living dead!
T
macholz, I agree, the actions of the state after the event simply serve to add to the crimes that were committed against you and those who went through the system with you. It’s a desperate wrong that was committed.
FPL, that is indeed a dismal irony. But doesn’t it tell us everything we need to know about the structures we have to operate in?
EWI, thankfully I didn’t go to a religious school, but friends of mine who left in the late 80s had similar tales, and worse, to tell. And that wasn’t exactly hidden knowledge. It’s amazing how compartmentalised it all was.
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