By Gerry O'Carroll
Herald
May 27, 2009
http://www.herald.ie/opinion/columnists/gerry-ocarroll/we-jailed-cahill-now-lets-jail-the -monks-who-made-him-what-he-was-1752227.html
If there are still wanted Nazis being brought to justice, then why can't we as a sovereign nation find those who brutalised generations of our young?
It should not be beyond the gardai and the DPP to track down and charge the clerics who ruled the institutions like SS camp guards.
They wore clerical garb but they had the hearts and minds of Nazis.
They broke the most sacrosanct of rules; they tortured the minds and bodies of children.
The abuse of children in the institutions is our very own holocaust.
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| ABUSE: Martin Cahill, The General, outside Dublin District Court in 1988 |
Church leaders should be on their knees begging forgiveness for what the members of their institutions inflicted during their reign of terror. Instead they play word and PR games on our airwaves
Now they must pay. Of course they must cough up the cash and personally I think the State should confiscate their property, too.
But more than that, they should face criminal charges.
The surviving torturers and rapists must be found and prosecuted.
That's why this sorry excuse for a Justice Minister we have should get off his arse and do something about it.
It would be no problem for him to set up a special garda unit with its own prosecutor to hunt down the surviving abusers. After all, aren't Nazis in their 90s still being tracked down across the globe and charged.
Dante said that outside the gates of hell, it reads: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."
The institutions in the Ryan Report would surely justify those chilling words.
In these horrific centres of abuse, innocent and helpless children were violated and subjected to sickening cruelty and systematic torture.
The wrecks of humanity who emerged were like broken dolls that would never be whole human beings again.
Misery
Thousands who came from these dark dungeons were never able to form or maintain relationships.
Only God knows how many sad and pathetic souls ended their lives in despair and misery.
The Church, behind whose shield those psychopaths masqueraded as servants of Jesus, cannot wash its hands of guilt.
In my career as a detective I dealt with many who had fallen down on their luck, many of whom laid the blame for their blighted lives at the hands of the clerical brutes.
Indeed, the infamous General Martin Cahill once told me in a moment of rare honesty: "You know what made me what I am, Gerry? The mad monks down in the bog."
Cahill had been an inmate in the notorious Daingean reformatory as a child.
But it's to the credit of the vast majority that they led law abiding lives after the horrors they suffered. And none to my knowledge tried to exact revenge on the clerical brutes.
Now we must find the absuers and make them pay for the thousands of damaged lives they have caused. It's up to the gardai and Dermot Ahern to do this.
I am appalled at the laconic response of both up to now.
They have an overriding duty to find the clerical criminals.
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