Children Of The Poor Clares (32 page)

During a 1996 trial, it emerged that a horrendous level of sexual and physical abuse was perpetrated during the 1980s on children from ‘traveller’ families who had been placed in Trudder house in Co. Wicklow, a voluntary institution funded through the Eastern Health Board. Allegations had been made against several members of its lay staff, but there was only one conviction.

Boys at St. Joseph’s Ferryhouse Industrial School in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary were being brutalized until 1993, according to a statement by Father Joe O’Reilly of the Rosminian Institute of Charity which ran Ferryhouse and the St. Patrick’s Industrial School in Upton, Co. Cork. Fr. O’Reilly said that the boys were beaten for a wide range of reasons, including bedwetting. This was happening despite a 1989 letter from the Department of Education warning that the ban on corporal punishment in national schools now also applied to Industrial Schools. Father O’Reilly admitted that the boys lived in an atmosphere of constant fear and anxiety, and were left cold and hungry, while priests dined in comfort.
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In 1993 the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge, who owned and operated the largest Magdalen laundry business in the country in their convent at High Park in Dublin, decided to sell off the graveyard to pay their debts—incurred through financial losses in their investments.
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It was found that the graveyard contained the remains of 133 women who had spent their lives ‘purging their sins’ by washing Irish society’s dirty laundry. Illegally imprisoned, often for life, they were considered to be ‘fallen women’—which included both prostitutes and single mothers, as well as girls and women deemed socially unacceptable, usually by a parent or priest. The first body was believed to have been buried in 1866 and the last in 1983. When the graves were being excavated, discrepancies were found: there were more bodies than had been officially recorded. For 58 of the bodies there were no death certificates and no explanation for their absence. Permission was granted for the exhumation of the bodies which were then cremated and their ashes reburied in a common double grave in Glasnevin, without identification. There was general outrage at the disrespect to the women’s remains in death. But as to their lives?

*       *       *

In parallel to accumulating information coming out through the courts and the scandal of the Magdalen graveyard, books were being published, plays performed, and documentaries broadcast on radio and television. They increased public knowledge and political awareness of every aspect of institutional malfeasance and villainy, and of State negligence and irresponsibility. Some focused on direct personal experience. Of these, the earliest had been Mannix Flynn’s
Nothing
to
Say,
published in 1983, which told of his terrible childhood in Letterfrack Industrial School where he was sent in 1968 at the age of eleven, and which was the basis for his one-man show,
James
X
, performed in Dublin in 2003 and 2004. Paddy Doyle’s
The
God
Squad
, published in 1988 was a devastating account of the emotional and physical neglect he suffered in St. Michael’s, the Sisters of Mercy Industrial School in Cappoquin, which left him grossly disabled.
Song
for
a
Raggy
Boy
by Patrick Galvin, a fictionalized version of his experiences at the notorious Reformatory School at Daingean in the late 1930s, was published in 1990 and later made into a film. Distributed internationally, the film
Magdalen
Sisters
revealed the hopeless misery of Magdalen laundries where it had been public knowledge that women were incarcerated, secreted away outside the legal system.

In 1997, a documentary,
Dear
Daughter
, was shown on Radio Telefis Eireann. Directed by Louis Lentin, it told of the lives of children who had spent their early years in St. Vincent’s Industrial School, Goldenbridge, Dublin, run by the Sisters of Mercy.
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(For some viewers, one of the most enduring images was the description of little girls from the age of four up with open sores on their fingers forced to make endless strands of rosary beads that the nuns sold.) Watched by a large audience, the vicious cruelty and child exploitation shocked viewers and provoked much public reaction. Subsequently, the Conference of Religious in Ireland (C.O.R.I.) set up a telephone helpline for people who had been abused while in care. In its first year, the help-line received more than 1,000 calls. By 1999, the number had risen to almost 5,000. Later, C.O.R.I. established a free counseling service.
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Following the showing of the documentary, the Irish Sisters of Mercy issued an apology—the first religious community to do so. While claiming to apologise unreservedly to those who had been badly treated in their care, they added a significant paragraph to their statement: ‘Life in the Ireland of the ‘40s and ‘50s was generally harsh for many people. This was reflected in the orphanages which were under-funded, under-staffed and under-resourced. In these circumstances many sisters gave years of dedicated service. Notwithstanding these facts, clearly mistakes were made.’ But the crucial claim of this paragraph, of under-funding, was not true, as we have emphasized before. The Industrial Schools and Reformatories were funded by the State with sufficient money to feed and clothe the children adequately, take care of their health, and provide them with education. In much of the public defence offered by the Religious Orders then and later, they repeatedly claimed the same excuse: shortage of financial support. But they never produced their account books. (In an article for
The
Irish
Times,
in January 2000, Fintan O’Toole, wrote that he had seen some of the records of the Christian Brothers’ Industrial School in Letterfrack. In 1969 its income had been
£
19,131; its expenditures
£
12,296. In 1973 there had been a profit of almost
£
12,000. This School like many of the others for boys had run a farm—for which they had supplied the labour.)

In one case that would come before the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse
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, it was clear that at the Baltimore Fisheries Industrial School scarcely any of the funding had been passed on for the care of the boys. Until it closed in 1950, its administration was under the direct control of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ross, who was also ex-officio Chairman of the Governors, and not that of a Religious Order. Justice Mary Laffoy, the Commission’s chairperson found there had been levels of starvation, deprivation, filth, physical and sexual abuse there so extreme as to verge on the unbelievable.

Another example was the Rosminians, who were responsible for two Industrial Schools: St. Joseph’s Ferryhouse, Clonmel and St. Patrick’s, Upton, Co. Cork. In their testimony to the Commission, the representatives of the Order made the standard claim about shortage of funds. Again, as with the Sisters of Mercy, this was not true. On a
per
capita
basis, adequate payments were made to all the institutions, but the Department of Education did not demand that accounts be presented, and the evident gap between funding and the condition of the children was ignored. Contrary to what has repeatedly been said, had the administrators of the institutions used the funding properly and for the purpose it was intended, the children in Industrial Schools, in the prevailing conditions of the times, would have been adequately cared for. When funding for these institutions was increased in the 1940s and 1950s, the Department of Finance issued a sharp reminder that the money was to be spent on the children—demonstrating that it had been noted that there was a discrepancy between monies handed out and the spending on its intended recipients.
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It begs the fundamental and as yet unanswered question: what did the religious orders do with the funding they received for the children from the State?
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A major turning point in the revelations about these Schools came in 1999, in a three-part documentary series
States
of
Fear
, shown on Radio Telefis Eireann. Produced and directed by Mary Raftery with Dr. Eoin O’Sullivan, it exposed with chilling intensity, the physical and sexual maltreatment experienced by children committed to Industrial and Reformatory Schools. The programmes showed starkly the emotional deprivation and the irreparably damaged lives of countless children. It had an enormous impact on the Irish public, and hundreds of men and women who had been through the system found the courage to bring their experiences into the public arena for the first time. Later that year, a book,
Suffer
the
Little
Children:
The
Inside
Story
of
Ireland’s
Industrial
Schools,
by Raftery and O’Sullivan was published, based on research with access to previously blocked Department of Education files. The record of the past was now exposed to view.

All of this, coming in the decades after our book was first published, was a vindication of what we had documented, and for which we had been criticised. By 1999, the issue of institutional abuse had become a major public talking point. The Church was being vilified for the shameful and criminal behavior of members of its Religious Orders and for its attempts to hide it, and the State condemned for its failure to fulfill its legislated obligation to the children it had taken under its protection. In effect, there had been an accumulative and accelerating process of discovery and comment about the treatment of children that had taken place in the vast gulag of Ireland’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools. Our book had focused on one of these institutions, and though we touched on information about others, we could not then authoritatively claim that what we had described about Cavan—‘one of the good schools’—had been replicated so extensively throughout the Republic. Revelations in the media, although countered by the Religious Orders, were being reinforced by a growing number of prosecutions of individual clerics and lay workers for sexual assault, whose sordid details deeply disgusted the public.

The country, including its political representatives, had to confront a culture of institutionalized brutality, of sadism, perversion, neglect, and deprivation affecting thousands of lives. It was also understood that legislation for whose implementation governments had been responsible, and that was designed to protect, feed, clothe, educate and care for the health of children in need, had been ignored and flouted. And, further, that the Church had rejected interference from the State, and that the State had colluded in this situation. The result of this collusion had meant there were no effective controls and thousands of children had been its victims. Under growing pressure to take action, the government had to respond.

*       *       *

In an address to the Dail, Ireland’s parliament, on 11 May, 1999, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern made a landmark announcement: ‘On behalf of the State and of all citizens of the State, the Government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue.’ Acknowledging the responsibility of the State, he promised to introduce various measures whose purpose would be to enable the adult survivors to tell their stories and receive recompense for their suffering. Along with a national counseling service for the victims to be set up at an estimated cost of 4 million pounds
per
annnum
, there was to be a Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.
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Thousands of living ex-pupils of the system thus had reason to believe, in the Taoiseach’s words, that a light had been ‘shone into the dark corners of both our past and present… challenging our collective complacency’, also to trust his promise to ‘address the injustices of the past… ‘Many of them were to remain satisfied with his words and actions. When Mr. Ahern resigned in 2008, Christine Buckley whose childhood experiences in the Industrial School in Goldenbridge had been the basis for ‘
Dear
Daughter’
, and who now represented Aislinn, one of the survivors’ groups which had been formed in Ireland and England, wrote in a letter to
The
Irish
Times
that his ‘unreserved apology to the survivors of institutional abuse in Ireland… lifted the veil of secrecy, stigma and injustice which had dogged our lives and impeded our future. His apology touched our hearts profoundly because it was clear that he had listened to survivors with a depth of commitment unequalled by any other politician, apart from the then Minister of Education, Michael Martin. This became evident in the swiftness with which he followed up his words with actions that supported the healing process for all of us who had endured the regimes of the various institutions which had destroyed our childhoods… Bertie Ahern will forever hold a special place in the hearts of survivors.’

But long-established and ingrained attitudes die hard: within a year of his announcement there were misgivings as an old pattern began to emerge. By the time the Bill setting up the Commission came before the Dail in April 2000, Mr. Ahern had replaced Michael Martin, his Minister of Education—a man considered to be sympathetic to the ex-pupils—with Dr. Michael Woods, widely seen as a religious conservative, sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church and therefore to be relied on to draft and implement legislation in the Church’s interest. This was, indeed, what happened: the Government’s legislative proposals were structured to protect both itself and those accused of wrong-doing. An early and telling instance of this was that unlike the usual situation when evidence given before a tribunal can be made available for civil actions and criminal investigations, this was not to be allowed with respect to the Commission.