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	Eire/ the Ryan Report/ 1 By John Waters Il Sussidiario June 29, 2009 http://www.ilsussidiario.net/articolo.aspx?articolo=28737 Reserving to itself vast resources of power, the State tends towards evil. In a sense, it cannot really be “good”, and even with eternal watchfulness and oppeness can never do much better than avoid outright corruption. The Ryan report describes a wholesale State-driven system of child abuse. The Catholic Church was, of course, deeply implicated, but with the collusion of the Department of Education, the police and the courts. Usually, when this is said, it is interpreted as an attempt to in some complex way “excuse” the Church, to spread the blame. But in Ireland now the opposite is more common: an avoidance of State responsibility so as to emphasise the Church’s wrongdoing. Without in any way seeking to diminish the evil that was done by people who claimed to walk in the way of Christ, it needs to be recorded that not a single Irish child could have been taken into one of these institutions without the say-so of the State. None of it could have happened had the State not colluded, had the police and the courts and even the (alleged) national child-protecton agency not arranged for a steady flow of victims to be provided to the Church-run institutions of torture and degradation. The report describes a wholesale State-sponsored system of child abuse and mentions in particular the “deferential and submissive attitude” of the Department of Education towards the religious congregations on whose watch the abuses occurred. It is clear now that State-run systems of the time operated to a reflex impulse of denial, at the heart of which lay a knot of ideological rationalisation, called upon by each component to justify its own role. The dominant ideological proposition was that troublesome children were a threat to public order, rendering justifiable almost any means deemed necessary for their subjugation. A child sucked into this system was rendered beyond the embrace of public compassion. It is important to stress that much of what has emerged in the Ryan report was already known about. The report is, of course, the first substantial official examination of this dark history. It contains shades of detail that add something to the texture of popular understanding. But, substantively speaking, there is nothing particularly new, nothing in the general picture that has not been widely known and understood for decades. The filigreed letter of these horrors has been met by ritualistic expression of shock, horror and disapproval. In a strange reversal of earlier cultural responses, the details have been greeted with ostentatious shows of outrage. Now that these events are safely in the past, Irish society and its political establishment have become enthusiastic in their condemnation. It appears to be a characteristic of such phenomena that the level of outrage becomes an almost precise replication of the earliet denial. It is not, however, that the scales have suddenly been lifted from the eyes of society, but that, as a result of the easing by the passing of time of collective guilt and powerlessness, a new generation feels able to ventilate and excoriate the sins of its predecessors. Most Irish people over 35 recall being beaten in school, corporal punishment in the education system having been abolished only three decades ago. In my childhood, 40 years ago, the threat of being sent to the reformatory at Letterfrack, in beautiful Connemara, was one of the most effective instruments with which to subdue an unruly child's spirit. In other words, the wider society, including its official elements, knew at the time that decency had been abandoned, but the corruption of State power and the felt impotence of individual citizens unleashed a deadly cultural concoction of fear, powerlessness, contrived scepticism, and impatience with those few who insisted that something evil was happening. It takes courage to challenge people with powers to incarcerate children in State gulags, and so the popular perspective on these obscenities was expressed in nods and winks and nervous jokes whispered behind hands. Oddly, when RTE, the national broadcaster, transmitted its purportedly groundbreaking television documentary series on the matter a decade ago, the public response comprised the same mixture of horror and surprise as recently greeted the Ryan report. States of Fear was a well-made series, outlining its case with sincerity and precision, but its essential content was not new. For 20 years, there has been a parade through the various communications media of former inmates of the Irish industrial school system, all seeking to draw attention to their experiences. There had already been a number of books, in which the facts were outlined in a manner at least as compelling as in States of Fear or in the Ryan report. The dismaying truth is that, even in adulthood, those whose childhoods had been stolen were still far from cherished. It is, of course, true that nothing, or very little, was suspected about the sexual abuse that was occurring in Church-run institutions for orphans and “wayward” children. But the State not merely turned a blind eye to the industrial-level corporal punishment being administered in these institutions, it also, for many years, refused to change its policy on corporal punishment, then in widespread use throughout the Irish education system. One of the most interesting aspects of the discussion in the wake of the publication of the Ryan report has been the apparent desire of many of those promoting the attacks on the Church to avoid the question of corporal punishment policy, which was maintained by all governments, including “liberal” governments, right up to 1981. The most courageous and consistently-raised voice against this culture was neither a journalist nor a politician, but a medical doctor, Cyril Daly, who in his early 30s in the 1960s, began speaking out against the axis-of-evil comprising Irish State and Catholic Church. Dr Daly was, and remains, a committed Catholic who opposed violence against children from, odd as this may have been made to seem, a Christian perspective. What jumps out of the archive is how, no matter how irrefutable the facts, establishments will defend the indefensible to the bitter end. When Dr Daly denounced the Irish education system on American television in 1971, he was declared “anti-clerical” and accused of letting Ireland down in the eyes of the world. In the past month he has found it impossible to get letters commenting on the Ryan report published in the Irish newspapers. The publication of the Ryan report, then, offers many insights into the way awful things can happen, be known about by large numbers of people, and yet continue for many years.
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