Children Of The Poor Clares (34 page)

Although the Redress Board’s remit expanded to allegations of wrongdoing and abuse in child-care institutions such as Mother and Baby Homes and orphanages outside the Industrial School system, it continued to exclude the women—among them those transferred as girls from Industrial Schools—who had been illegally and indefinitely imprisoned and used as slave labour in the notorious Magdalen laundries, the ‘asylums’ that had been such a shameful part of Ireland’s post-Independence extra-legal penal system. As in the case of what has been described as its equivalent, the Soviet Union’s vast gulag, the public knew about the Magdalen asylums. The crucial difference was that their existence was accepted in a country which defined itself as a democracy, with a functioning, representative parliament and which, in theory, provided all its citizens with the protections of the rule of law, of
habeas
corpus
and of an independent judiciary.

Looking at what happened after Bertie Ahern’s formal apology in the Dail—the manipulation of the legislation by government; the deviousness of the ‘indemnity deal’; the difficulties put in the path of Justice Mary Laffoy; the obstructionist application form; the way the Redress Board was structured—one has to wonder about the true motives behind the speech. Could they have been political and financial expediency? There was a very real threat of court actions not only against the Orders but against the State which could have resulted in enormous awards for damages, far in excess of the Board’s scale of compensation, for its past derelictions of responsibility towards tens of thousands of children. Was it pressure from the Church? Or a mixture of both?
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*       *       *

Apologies and acceptances of responsibility from the Church were grudgingly few and came slowly. Reacting to public anger at the Madonna House scandal in 1993, there had been a limited apology from the Irish Sisters of Charity. Expressing their deep regret at what had happened, they added that it was important ‘not to lose sight of the many hundreds of children in our care, who experienced only love, care and safety from very committed staff.’ There was no admission of responsibility in this apology, nor in the 1998 statement these Sisters made regretting what had happened at St. Joseph’s, Kilkenny. This, too, was issued in response to public disgust after the criminal courts had exposed the extensive sexual abuse in the institution. The wrong-doing, they emphasized, had been by lay employees, not by members of their Order, and at a time when, they—inaccurately—claimed, there was little knowledge of sexual abuse.

In 1998, after several members of the Christian Brothers had been arrested and were awaiting trial on sex assault charges relating to children in their Industrial Schools, the Brothers issued a statement expressing deep regret to anyone who suffered ill-treatment while in their care. Again, there was no admission of responsibility for what had happened.

In the years immediately after Mr. Ahern’s speech, the Church and the Religious Orders that had operated the Industrial and Reformatory School system, sheltered behind the flurry of State activity. The Conference of Religious of Ireland (C.O.R.I.) made a low-key apology at the time of the indemnity deal, for abuse, neglect and deprivation suffered by children in their care. When Sister Patricia Rogers was appearing before the Redress Board on behalf of the Poor Clares, she explained the Order’s position on the matter: ‘We have not issued a public apology, but we have associated ourselves with the C.O.R.I. apology, because we would accept that for many years the daily routine in the institutions, they just didn’t take account of the needs of children. The life was too regulated and too disciplined to allow for differences in their physical and emotional development.’ And that was as far as it went.

In May 2004, however, the Sisters of Mercy Leadership Team issued this statement: ‘On behalf of the Congregation of the sisters of Mercy we… wish to say to all those who as children lived in our Orphanages/Industrial schools: We accept unreservedly that many of you who spent your childhood in our Orphanages/Industrial schools run by our Congregation were hurt and damaged while in our care. We believe that you suffered physical and emotional trauma.

‘We have in the past publicly apologised to each one of you for the suffering we have caused. We express our heartfelt sorrow and ask your forgiveness. We ask forgiveness for our failure to care for you and protect you in the past and for our failure to hear you in the present. We are distressed by our failures. We have been earnestly searching to find a way to bring about healing. We need your help to do this.

‘We recognize that this statement may be considered too little too late. We make it in the hope that it will be a further step in the long process of healing the pain that we as a Congregation have caused. Finally we failed those sisters in our Congregation whom we put in the situation of caring for you without adequate supports or resources. For that too we apologise and take responsibility.’

Mary Raftery, whose TV documentary
States
of
Fear
had precipitated Bertie Ahern’s Dail apology, commented that this statement from the Sisters of Mercy was without precedent on any continent ‘where children have been abused in Catholic Church-run institutions. Inevitably the unconditional nature of the Mercy apology will beg important questions of the other seventeen congregations who ran industrial schools in Ireland.’

In November 2003, Brother Maurice Tobin, who had worked in Letterfrack, was sentenced at Galway Circuit Court to 12 years in prison for the sexual abuse of 14 boys at this Industrial School. He arrived in 1959, aged 27, and was there until it closed in 1974. In his summary, the judge said that Tobin ‘systematically molested, beat and buggered little boys, aged from 11 to 14 who were sent to work in his kitchen. The accused, who is still a stout strong man, given his age, was originally charged with 140 cases of buggery and indecent assault involving his victims over these decades.’ Thus Peter Tyrrell’s passionate insistence conveyed fruitlessly to the Tuarim Committee in the 1960s, that physical and sexual assaults were still endemic in Letterfrack, was yet again vindicated.

The views of many who had undergone similar experiences were summarized by one of Brother Tobin’s victims. He said that he ‘blamed Irish society, Irish parents and the Catholic Church for allowing unprotected children to be abused in such a systematic way.’ This man said he lived in England, where he felt he could get away from the burden of memories.

Commenting on the case, Brother Denis Gleeson, spokesman for the Christian Brothers, maintained that ‘there was no widespread or systematic abuse in institutions run by the Christian Brothers, and the Congregation was not aware of abuse while it was going on.’ He added: ‘Abuse by its nature is covert. It is only in recent years, with police investigation, that we have come to know of it. How it can go on in an institution or a family without being discovered, I simply cannot say.’ Less than a year later, in July 2004, at a hearing before the Redress Board, it was learnt that files had been discovered in the Rome headquarters of the Christian Brothers revealing 30 proven allegations of sexual abuse in their Industrial Schools. Their archivist was said to have found no evidence that any of these allegations had been reported to the civil or police authorities at the time. They included 11 at Artane and 3 at Letterfrack, but the Order’s representative at the Board doubted the veracity of some of the later complaints which ‘could not have happened.

One answer to Brother Gleeson’s disingenuous musings can be found in the words of Jim Beresford, a ‘former child prisoner at Artane’ and a researcher for the organization, Irish Survivors of Child Abuse: ‘Secrecy is the Irish disease’ he says. ‘Child abuse thrives on secrecy. Secrecy was employed to facilitate and conceal the abuse of Southern Ireland’s child prisoners down the dark decades since 1921’.

One positive outcome of these past years has been that hundreds of ex-pupils like Mr. Beresford have found the strength and courage to band together to push for justice, and by making their voices heard through survivors’ groups, Internet websites and the media, to challenge the disbelief and end the silence about the terror and deprivation of their childhood.

In August 2007 Mr. Beresford wrote the foreword to a report on Artane, the huge bleak factory-like Industrial School for boys, run by the Christian Brothers near Dublin. Prepared by Father Henry Moore, the school chaplain, the report had been presented to Archbishop John C. McQuaid in 1962. It was only now being made public forty-five years later. Fr. Moore’s report detailed the lack of proper medical treatment, the low educational standards, absence of winter clothing and referred to ‘rigid and severe’ discipline. The famous Boys Band, wrote Fr. Moore, was ‘the only worthwhile achievement of the school.’
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(Much evidence has since emerged that although the pupils wanted to join the band because the boys were given better food and clothes and went on tour, many of them were sexually assaulted by the paedophile music director, the late Brother Joseph O’Connor.)

Commenting on the difficulties in getting access to the report, Mr. Beresford wrote that ‘Many thousands of similar documents are being concealed by the government and the Commission (to Inquire into Child Abuse) because those documents vindicate the complainants and incriminate the theocratic State. The eight-year long multi-million euro cover-up continues. Its objective is to produce a fake history of Southern Ireland’s child prisons.’

When Brother Michael Reynolds represented the Christian Brothers at a public hearing of the Redress Board in May 2006 to give testimony about Artane, he was exposed to objections and heckling. He was faced with hard, detailed and extensive questioning by members of the Commission and by Counsel for ex-pupils’ organisations about instances of sexual abuse relating to specific Brothers. Brother Reynolds admitted that police had not been notified about known assaults, and thought that there had been ‘a serious lack of judgement’ when known abusers had been transferred to other schools rather than expelled from the order, and make the outrageous claim that at the time the effect on a child of sexual abuse ‘wasn’t understood’. In one of the Christian Brothers’ internal documents produced before the Board, an—unidentified—Brother known to have molested the boys was described as ‘more to be pitied than censured’; another ex– Brother was recorded as saying that it was ‘the collar that saved him from jail.’

Asked about the whereabouts of the punishment book required by the regulations, Brother Reynolds told the Board that it was non-existent at Artane. From the Order’s own files about this vast institution—which has since been demolished—a picture emerged of boys with rotten teeth, in long-condemned buildings, making tin bowls and spoons as part of their training into the 1960s. Commenting on Brother Reynold’s evidence, a Counsel for a survivors’ group said that ‘every time that the Christian Brothers are asked a hard question about the regime in any of their schools the answer is, “well, you have to put it into the context of the times… Times were rough outside. What we did inside was no different.”‘

An admission by the Brother that he had never been at Artane drew the outrage of an ‘unknown speaker’ in the crowd listening to his testimony. Like Sister Patricia of the Poor Clares, and most of the Orders’ representatives who appeared before the Board, Brother Reynolds explained that members of his Order who had worked at the Schools could not attend because, if not dead, they were now too old or too ill; others were said to have left their Orders, their whereabouts unknown.

*       *       *

‘
This,
maybe,
is
the
important
thing
about
the
current
revelations
of
abuse
 . . .
They
affect
not
just
the
women
who
still
bear
the
physical
and
mental
marks,
but
the
whole
way
in
which
this
society
remembers
itself.
They
show
us,
again,
that
we
do
not
yet
have
a
stable
point
of
reference
even
in
the
very
recent
past
from
which
to
judge
where,
and
who,
we
are
.’ Columnist Fintan O’Toole, writing in
The
Irish
Times
March 1996.

Motivated to write our book by meeting Mary and Clare in 1972, we focused on the story of one institution—untypical only because of the deadly fire in 1943, and we followed the lives of the ex-pupils after they left. One could only marvel at the resilience of spirit against such odds that could be seen in some of them, although so many others were obviously damaged irreparably. But the book also dealt more broadly with the iniquities of the Industrial School system, the negligence and timidity of the civil service, the inertia of politicians in the face of the huge over-riding power of the Catholic Church which ran the system and controlled its administration; the pervasively devious responses of both Religious and State authority in the face of the law; the State’s betrayal of its duties to implement its own laws and regulations, and, ultimately, the acceptance by Irish society of what has more recently been described as Ireland’s ‘ideologically-inspired mass incarceration system for non-offenders.’
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