IRISH CHURCH KNEW ABUSE 'ENDEMIC'

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                                             Irish church knew abuse 'endemic' 






BBC NEWS
May 20, 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8059826.stm
VIDEO

Victims spokesman John Kelly gives his reaction to the report


An inquiry into child abuse at Catholic institutions in Ireland has found church leaders knew that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions.

It also found physical and emotional abuse and neglect were features of institutions.

Schools were run "in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff".

The nine-year inquiry investigated a 60-year period.

About 35,000 children were placed in a network of reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses up to the 1980s.

More than 2,000 told the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse they suffered physical and sexual abuse while there.

Police were called to the commission's news conference amid angry scenes as victims were prevented from attending.

More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than the other male orders combined.

The report found child safety was not a priority for the Christian Brothers who ran the institutions, the order was defensive in its response to complaints and failed to accept any congregational responsibility for abuse.
 
Irish church knew abuse 'endemic' 
Victims spokesman John Kelly gives his reaction to the report
An inquiry into child abuse at Catholic institutions in Ireland has found church leaders knew that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions.

It also found physical and emotional abuse and neglect were features of institutions.

Schools were run "in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff".

The nine-year inquiry investigated a 60-year period.

About 35,000 children were placed in a network of reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses up to the 1980s.

More than 2,000 told the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse they suffered physical and sexual abuse while there.

Police were called to the commission's news conference amid angry scenes as victims were prevented from attending.

More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than the other male orders combined.

The report found child safety was not a priority for the Christian Brothers who ran the institutions, the order was defensive in its response to complaints and failed to accept any congregational responsibility for abuse. 

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Ritual beatings



The report said that girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

The five-volume study concluded that church officials encouraged ritual beatings and consistently shielded their orders' paedophiles from arrest amid a "culture of self-serving secrecy".

It also found that government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

  The reformatory and industrial schools depended on rigid control by means of severe corporal punishment and the fear of such punishment

Mr Justice Sean Ryan


The commission said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.

"The reformatory and industrial schools depended on rigid control by means of severe corporal punishment and the fear of such punishment," it said.

"The harshness of the regime was inculcated into the culture of the schools by successive generations of brothers, priests and nuns.

"It was systemic and not the result of individual breaches by persons who operated outside lawful and acceptable boundaries.





 CASE STUDY


"You'd be up at 6am and you had to go to two Masses," said Sadie O'Meara, a 15-year-old Tipperary girl working in Dublin.

"Your cell door was locked every night when you went in and you had a bucket and an iron bed and you couldn't look out the window. It was all bars.

"The food was absolutely brutal. And my mam died but they never told me she died. She died on Christmas Day but they never told me."

Ms O'Meara was speaking to Shane Harrison of BBC News in Dublin

 
Read more

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8059826.stm

 
"Excesses of punishment generated the fear that the school authorities believed to be essential for the maintenance of order."




The report proposed 21 ways the government could recognise past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counselling and education to victims, and improving Ireland's current child protection services.

Its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions - in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report.

No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document. 

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                                         Irish priests beat, raped children: report
           





Padraic Halpin And
Carmel Crimmins
– MAY 20, 2009
DUBLIN
(Reuters)

– Priests beat and raped children during decades of abuse in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland, a report said Wednesday.

Orphanages and industrial schools in 20th century Ireland were places of fear, neglect and endemic sexual abuse, the report said.

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, established by the government in 2000, blasted successive generations of priests, nuns and Brothers for beating, starving and, in some cases raping, children in Ireland's network of industrial and reformatory schools between the 1930s and 1990s.

"A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys," the report said.

"Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from."

The five-volume report, published after a nine-year investigation into institutions now closed down, also slammed the Department of Education for its deferential attitude to the religious orders and its failure to stop the abuse.

The Commission interviewed 1,090 men and women who were housed in 216 institutions including children's homes, hospitals and schools.

Many of the children were sent into church care because of school truancy, petty crime or because they were unmarried mothers or their offspring.

Tom Sweeney, who spent five years at industrial schools including two years at one where the report said sexual abuse was a "chronic problem," said the Artane Industrial School continued to haunt its former residents.

"Anybody that came into Artane did not come out a happy person and unfortunately there are a lot of people that have committed suicide, there are a lot of people that have ended up in hospitals and they have been forgotten about.

"You didn't forget about Artane and you never forget about it."

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MORAL AUTHORITY



Revelations of abuse, including a string of scandals involving priests molesting young boys, have eroded the Catholic Church's moral authority in Ireland, once one of the most religiously devout countries in the world.

The inquiry, conducted at a reported cost of 70 million euros ($95.16 million), was announced in 1999 by then Prime Minister Bertie Ahern after he apologized to victims following revelations made in a series of television documentaries.

It recommended that a memorial should be erected to all the victims of abuse in institutions and recommended that national childcare policy be reviewed on a regular basis.

In the United States, a sexual abuse scandal was uncovered in 2002 and involved mostly abuse of teenage boys by priests.

The religious orders investigated in Ireland include the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of Refuge who ran Dublin's Magdalene Laundry -- the subject of the 2002 film 'The Magdalene Sisters'.

Also investigated were the Christian Brothers, who delayed proceedings through a successful court action defending their members' right to anonymity.

The action led to the commission dropping its original intention to name the people against whom the allegations were made and only those who have already been convicted can be mentioned in the report.

The commission, originally set up for two years, was also delayed by what it described as the "adversarial and legalistic" approach of religious orders and by the resignation of its first chairwoman Justice Mary Laffoy a year later after a clash with the Department of Education.



The report can be downloaded at:

http://www.childabusecommission.ie/index.html




(Editing by
Charles Dick)