By Emma Alberici
ABC News (Australia)
May 21, 2009
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/21/2576569.htm
A major investigation into child abuse at Catholic orphanages, reformatories and schools in Ireland has found that beatings, sexual abuse and humiliation were endemic.
The groundbreaking report, released overnight, found that the state of Ireland "colluded with religious authorities to hide child abuse".
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| Survivors of Child Abuse group coordinator John Kelley (left) says there can be no closure without accountability Photo by Peter Muhly |
The judicial inquiry lasted 10 years and the report chronicles the shocking conditions under which 35,000 children were held in Catholic institutions, many of them from infancy to adulthood.
It also tells of the many offending members of the clergy who were sent abroad, where they were allowed to restart their lives without reference to their crimes.
The report makes for horrific reading, documenting in graphic detail how thousands of children were tortured mentally and physically by the Catholic Church in Ireland over six decades.
What makes the five-volume document so disturbing is that it clearly states that both the church hierarchy and the Irish Government knew what was going on but failed to stop the beatings, the rapes and humiliation.
As far back as the 1940s, inspectors reported broken bones and malnourished children but no action was taken.
More than 2,000 witnesses testified to the judicial inquiry, claiming abuse in 216 schools and residential institutions across Ireland.
Among them was Colm O'Gorman, who was abused by a Catholic priest for three years from the age of 14 to 17.
"And in 1994, when I went back to report those crimes to the Irish Police, I discovered not just that I had been raped and abused by this priest but that very, very many other children had also been assaulted by him," he said.
"But then even more shockingly, the Catholic Church had known before they ordained him about his propensity to abuse, that they had received countless complaints over the period of time that he was abusing and they'd done nothing about it. That they'd covered it up."
Colm O'Gorman has since become a campaigner, working on behalf of the many Irish children who gave evidence to the 10-year commission.
"This report documents how countless thousands, many, many thousands, of the most marginalised of Irish children were taken from their parents by the courts and placed in the so-called 'care' of institutions where they were brutalised, sodomised, raped, abused, beaten, deprived, neglected and abandoned," he said.
"Some of the people who were so horribly violated in these institutions remain in psychiatric care and institutional care now because they simply can't cope as a result of the impact of what it was that was done to them.
Mr O'Gorman says it is an indictment on the state of Ireland but it goes much wider than that.
"Right across the world, in Ireland, in Australia, in the United States, in Europe, in the developing world," he said.
"Time and time again, priests, religious bishops, decided that the rape of a child was less significant than the ego, money and power of their institution.
"Rather than address what happened, priests, religious brothers, whoever, were simply moved on to new places. And that's the truly awful global truth of these scandals."
The publication of the five-volume report had been delayed for a number of years after the Christian Brothers religious order successfully sued the Commission in 2004, winning the right to withhold the names of all its members, dead or alive, from the final draft.
John Walsh, of the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, says he feels cheated and deceived by the fact that no prosecutions will therefore be triggered by the long-awaited report.
"This inquiry is deeply flawed, it's incomplete, and many might call it a whitewash," he said.
The Commission found that the worst offenders came from the Christian Brothers order, which ran most of the institutions for older boys, while the Sisters of Mercy, which was supposed to care for girls, also came in for heavy criticism.
The report recommends 21 ways that the Irish Government could recognise past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial providing counselling and education to victims and improving current child protection services.
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