Children Of The Poor Clares (35 page)

In all that has happened since our book was first published, the interests of the women and men whom the State abandoned to neglect, vicious maltreatment and denial of their rights during their childhood in these institutions, should have been central. Instead they had once again been marginalized, their welfare subsumed by the interests State and Church. It would be reassuring to believe that the story of
Children
of
the
Poor
Clares
is now closed and should be consigned to history. But too many of the events which followed its first publication have been a tale of the same shameful collusion between Church and State that proved so destructive to the lives of tens of thousands of its most vulnerable children.

Nevertheless there has been a fundamental change. The past years have seen a major shift, an adjustment of the balance, in the relationship between much of Irish society and the Church. The once outwardly automatic respect for the ‘aura of the cloth’—the unquestioning acceptance of the moral status of members of the Religious Orders, of parish clergy and the Hierarchy—has been fundamentally eroded, not only by the Industrial School revelations but by a seemingly endless series of scandals involving other members of the clergy. Part of the public disillusionment has come from the insight into the systemic impulse on the part of the hierarchy to conceal criminal or other behaviour which it itself condemns.

The country’s awareness and open questioning of the hypocrisy behind the gap between moralistic preaching on sexuality and actual practice possibly started in 1992 with the exposure by the media of the fact that Bishop Eamon Casey of Galway, known for his social activism and progressive views, had fathered a child 18 years before, and had abandoned the mother and child, using church funds to buy their silence. This was shortly followed by revelations that Father Michael Cleary, known as ‘Ireland’s singing priest’ had fathered two children on his ‘housekeeper’.
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But the deep public alienation has come from revulsion after being confronted by the brutality and sexual abominations visited on the helpless children in the Industrial Schools, and from the tidal wave of multiple criminal charges and convictions of pederast and paedophilic priests who had betrayed Irish parents’ trust, molesting and raping their children. Among them were Father Ivan Payne, Father Paul McGennis—who had been the chaplain at the Crumlin Children’s Hospital, Father James Doyle, Father Tony Walsh, Father Noel Reynolds, Father Tom Naughton, Father Patrick Hughes, Brother Eunan
106
, Father Daniel Curran, Marist Brother Peter White, Father Eugene Green, Father Micheal Donovan, Father Donal Collins—who had been Principal of the Wexford Seminary, and Father Sean Fortune—who committed suicide in 1999 while facing twenty-nine sex abuse cases.

As with the Brothers in Industrial Schools, there was a pattern of attempted cover-ups by their superiors of their criminal acts, some of them quietly defrocked or permitted to laicise and disappear overseas; others sent away by their bishops for ‘treatment’ or shifted to other posts, where they could offend again—this was notoriously the case with Father Fortune who was moved on for years by Bishop Comiskey of Ferns whenever he received new complaints. There were also revelations about the efforts to finance out-of-court settlements in order to maintain secrecy in civil suits taken against priests. This pernicious secrecy, it emerged through the research of a lawyer in the United States, had actually been ordered in a secret 69-page document,
Crimine
Solicitationies,
which came from the Vatican in 1962, bearing Pope John XXIII’s seal, and was distributed to bishops around the world, instructing them in a policy of strictest secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse.

In March 2002, the BBC TV documentary ‘Suing the Pope’, focused on the experiences of Colm O’Gorman raped as a boy by Father Sean Fortune, and his attempt to obtain justice and admissions of responsibility from the Diocese of Ferns. His complaint to the Gardai about Father Fortune became a catalyst for others to come forward, and within weeks Micheal Martin, the Minister of Health set up the Ferns Inquiry. Although it was ‘non-statutory’, meaning that it could not compel witnesses to attend and evidence was unsworn, its report, presented in October 2005, identified over 100 allegations made between 1962 and 2002 of child sexual abuse against 21 priests under aegis of the Diocese. Only six of the priests were named, and half of those who had been accused and convicted in the courts did not co-operate. One of those named was Monsignor Ledwith, ex-President of the theological college at Maynooth, a man known for his sybaritic tastes. It became known that a young man had been paid a substantial sum to keep quiet about their relationship.
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One of the cases of criminal assault had resulted in the 1995 fall of the government of Bertie Ahern’s predecessor Albert Reynolds: it had been learned that his Attorney—General had ignored an extradition order for Father Brendan Smyth, who was wanted in Northern Ireland to answer charges of sexually assaulting seventeen young children. Father Smyth had been hiding in a monastery in Co. Cavan. Four years later, the case of Father Fortune was to force the Irish State for the first time to openly challenge, confront and dismiss the fundamental authority of the Catholic Church to govern itself: of the Church’s attempts to hide behind the protection of Canon Law, the Minister of Justice said this had ‘little more relevance than the rules of a golf club’ and could no longer be used as an excuse to withhold evidence in criminal cases.
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By October 2000, forty-eight clergy in Ireland had been convicted of sexual assaults of children during the years 1983 to 2000. The excuse often given by the Religious that they did not suspect what their colleagues were doing because they had not heard about of sexual abuse, was further weakened by the discovery that most Irish dioceses had taken out insurance against sexual abuse claims as long ago as 1987.
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People felt there was some kind of lacuna, a strange moral absence, in the mind of a church leader like Cardinal Desmond Connell: asked by a reporter why he had failed to encourage Father Sean Fortune’s victims to go to the police, he answered ‘I suppose I should have done… but I had so much else to do.’ In July 2002 when Cardinal Connell publicly sought ‘God’s forgiveness’, apologising for ‘Unspeakable harm’ done to those abused in the Schools, he had to run a gauntlet of protesters shouting ‘Hypocrite!’ and ‘your apologies are too late!’

Essentially what has happened is that the Irish public has become aware of the obvious moral contradictions in the religious institution that was once regarded as all-powerful, untouchable, and not to be questioned, and that had been so fundamental in defining their sense of national identity.

One crucially important way in which the relationship has changed can be seen reflected in Ireland’s political representatives. It was exemplified during the proceedings of the Oireachtas Committee of Public Accounts of July 8
th
2004. This was looking into the process by which the secret deal had been made between C.O.R.I. and the government to cap the Orders’ contribution to payments to the ex-pupils of Industrial Schools by the Redress Board, and that would also indemnify the Orders from possible prosecution for allegations of criminal behavior made during the Commission’s hearings. Deputies questioned the representatives of the Orders, attempting to establish the steps by which negotiations for what had initially been expected to be 50:50 Church and State contributions to the fund had ended up with the State—that is the public—taking on the financial burden of what was now obviously going to come to over €1 billion, while the Church had only to come up with that theoretical €128 million in cash, property and services. The Deputies’ highly informed and well-researched questions were civil, but they were persistent and relentless. This kind of independent behaviour, proper and appropriate to the country’s elected representatives, and now going unremarked, would simply have been unthinkable fifteen years earlier when dealing with leading members of the clergy. It was a revolutionary change, reflecting the public’s new attitudes, assumptions and knowledge.

In early 2008, Cardinal Connell, who had previously been Archbishop of Dublin until forced to resign because of his role in concealing clerical child abuse, became the focus of public ire during an unprecedented confrontation with his successor, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. The Cardinal had gone to the High Court in an attempt to obtain an injunction to prevent the Commission of Investigation into child abuse by priests in the Dublin archdiocese from examining documents handed over to it by Archbishop Martin. This Commission had been set up by the government because of the enormous amount of allegations of abuse: by 2007 there were approximately 450 legal actions pending in the archdiocese—150 against parish clergy, 300 against Orders who had run Industrial Schools. One of the issues it had to deal with was the failure of senior clerics over the years to report allegations of abuse. Archbishop Martin, impressive in his stand and by his determination that the truth be told, had commissioned an audit by independent assessors into thousands of files to search for undealt-with allegations going back to the 1970s. After a few days, Cardinal Connell—who had earlier travelled to Rome to get support—withdrew his bid.

Cardinal Connell was elderly, and perhaps had difficulty in understanding that Ireland had changed, that the public would no longer accept the culture of Church concealment, that the automatic respect had gone. He may not have taken in the significance of the recent statement by the Minister of Justice, Michael MacDowell, when he announced the new Commission: ‘I am not afraid of the bang of a crozier from any direction. I will follow this where it goes, how high it goes or how low it goes.’ Unfortunately for the girls of St. Joseph’s, Cavan, and the tens of thousands of other children who had passed through the Industrial School system, this determination of a government minister to carry out his statutory duties was far too late.

In May 2009, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published what is referred to as the Ryan Report, named after its chair. Its horrific descriptions of the torments, deprivation and depravity inflicted for decades upon tens of thousands of children in the Industrial and Reform Schools while the Ministry of Education shut its eyes, were relayed around the world by the media. The following month, it became known that the €127 million which 18 religious orders had earlier agreed to contribute to the Redress scheme had not even covered legal fees incurred to date at the Redress Board alone. At the same time it was estimated that the total cost to the State for institutional child abuse was likely to reach €1.4 billion—of which €400 million would be for legal costs. In February 2010, it was learned that victims of institutional sex abuse who seek compensation through the Redress Board and whose claims were accepted, had been receiving an average of €63,210. 814 claims had been ‘withdrawn, refused or given no award.’ The level of the awards was strongly criticised by Paddy Doyle
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, who pointed out that they fell far short of the sums granted in the courts, and which were nearer €350,000. Abuse victims, he said, had been pressured into accepting the Redress Board.

Ireland was not unique in permitting or ignoring the mass maltreatment of children in care. In Canada, from the turn of the 20
th
century until the 1970s, generations of aboriginal children were taken, at government
fiat
, from their families and placed in Indian Residential Schools, whose mandate was to remove their languages and cultural identity. Many (though not all) were run by nuns and brothers, the Irish experience mirrored in their treatment of the children—whose ills, infecting yet further generations, have not been cured by major financial settlements made in recent years. In the 1980s in St. John’s, Newfoundland, several of the Irish Christian Brothers who ran a boys’ orphanage were found guilty of sexually abusing the children: over the years police and politicians colluded in ignoring or covering up complaints.
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There were similar stories and charges from Australia. The authors are well aware that it is not only children in the institutional care of the Catholic Church who have been vulnerable to abuse—any more than abuse is itself an inevitability. But the main features that distinguished the Irish situation were the vastness of the Industrial School operations, and the fact that the spirit and letter of the 1908 Children Act under which the boys and girls had been sent to the Schools, and under which the Schools had operated, had much in it that was essentially protective and benevolent in spirit. The unnecessary tragedy for so many tens of thousands of Irish children was that the intent and the application of its detail were ignored. For this, the ultimate legal responsibility belonged—and belongs—to the Irish State.

*       *       *

Note: The Children Act of 1908 remained in place for ninety-three years. The new Children Act passed into law in 2001. It failed to include a system of inspection, of openness and accountability for children in residential care. In effect, it is without the mechanisms needed to protect the children. The Social Services Inspectorate, established in 1999, still has no statutory basis and no jurisdiction over children’s homes managed by voluntary agencies, including the Roman Catholic Church. Homes managed by voluntary bodies are inspected by the Health Boards. In 2010, at the time of writing, there is still no independent inspection for children in what are now termed Special Care Units. Have the lessons not been learned?

EPILOGUE
 

When we were working on the first edition of this book, we asked Clare to keep in touch with us, but heard nothing from her for almost two years. Then she contacted us to say that she and the child were going to England, to a live-in housekeeping job, and she would like to see us before she went. She also mentioned that she wanted to go back to St. Joseph’s one last time, so we offered to drive her. Clare looked tired and strained. She had found it hard to find work and was constantly in debt. She was going to England as a last resort.