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	The State in the Dock for Horror of the Church's Gulag By Ronan Farren Irish Independent November 1, 2009 http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/the-state-in-the-dock-for-horror-of-the-churchs-gulag-1930363.html Bruce Arnold is right to condemn the State for allowing massive institutional child abuse, argues Ronan Farren The Irish Gulag. How the State Betrayed its Innocent Children Bruce Arnold Gill and Macmillan ˆ16.99 Bruce Arnold's book The Irish Gulag, 10 years in the writing, is an insistent, outraged, disgusted condemnation of the agencies of the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish State. It is a compilation and in some cases an extension of Arnold's articles in the Irish Independent over the 10-year period of the investigation into institutional child abuse in Ireland. The title springs from the infamous Soviet Gulags, because, the author claims, (and it is hard to disagree) the structure of "industrial schools" operated by the religious orders in Ireland on behalf of the State since independence (and in some cases prior to that) is equivalent to the Soviet penal system: a vast network of prisons to which people were committed without cause, trial, due process, and in most cases without justification. Except that in Ireland, the inhabitants of the gulags were children often committed for periods in excess of 10 or 15 years. And contrary to public perception, they were not guilty of any offence (other than poverty) nor were they usually orphans. Arnold traces the history of the industrial school system where merciless flogging was the preferred and frequent punishment. On more than one occasion a child victim died under such punishment, while thousands of others were mutilated, broken, and emotionally scarred beyond recovery. The children were under-nourished to the point of near starvation, often scavenging in pig buckets for food, and were denied their legal right to a basic education in order to exploit them as slave labour for the financial benefit of the religious in charge. And all in an overwhelming climate of moral depravity which allowed for unrestricted sexual molestation, including rape, of helpless children. Arnold catalogues these horrors in savage, angry terms. But he is even more angry at what he sees as a deliberate fudging by the State of its own laws and Constitution in relation to the rights of the abused. This, he claims, enabled orders such as the Oblates, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Christian Brothers to perpetrate their outrages and set themselves above accountability. It is there Arnold points his finger most accusingly. The Department of Education's obfuscation and lack of co-operation to an extent that forced the Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse Ms Justice Mary Laffoy to resign in angry frustration is, he claims, the real and missing indictment. Referring to the States of Fear RTE programme (seminal in moving forward the public awareness of the issue) he writes that the refusal of the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy to co-operate, "resulted in the telling of a distorted story that was heavily weighted against the orders responsible for running the industrial schools, far less so against the government". Why not, one asks, if their arrogance and guilt led them to refuse co-operation? The obscene agreement signed on behalf of the State between the then Minister for Education Michael Woods and the religious orders, limiting the orders' financial responsibility for compensation to ˆ128m on the eve of a government leaving office, is also traced and rightly castigated. Arnold shows in pitiless detail the reality that was already obvious: compensation would, and should, run into the thousands of millions, with the Irish taxpayer having to foot the bill. He condemns this outright, but does not make the logical connection that if it is the State which bears most of the blame, then it is the State which should make most of the compensation. He also believes that the concentration of investigation on the sexual molestation had the effect (when it finally happened) of removing attention from the massive denial of human, legal, and civil rights to the children: a system of penal servitude without crimes having been committed, operated at a level of brutality which would have been excessive with adult criminals convicted of major crimes. In fact, he says, "The Department of Education was guilty of shameful dereliction of duty, embracing prevarication, exclusions, the imposition of penalty clauses in legislation, all designed to hedge in the prospects of the abused and put them under threat." Again, few would disagree, but for the purposes of this book, Arnold is, on the other hand, almost dewy-eyed in his admiration for various Fine Gael spokesmen and their performance in Dail debates on the issue. It's an admiration that seems to imply that things would have been entirely different had Fine Gael been in power, although there is little evidence of a Fine Gael interest during their own years in office in saving children from servitude, much less an active campaign for a change in the system. Arnold also accepts at face value reports that John Charles McQuaid, the authoritarian and all-powerful Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin at the height of the abuse years, would have liked to have seen Artane closed down. Objective assessment would suggest that had this been the case, the place would have disappeared overnight. And admiration for Frank Duff (a friend of McQuaid) and the founder of the right wing Catholic secret society the Legion of Mary, who was reportedly horrified at the "shovelling" of children into institutions, seems misplaced. Duff is credited with having realised that this was solely to enrich religious coffers by way of the capitation grants. So why did he not speak out? The depths of the horror suffered by hundreds of thousands of Irish children can never be repaired; that is an incontrovertible fact. Yes, the State bears a burden of blame for what happened, at which Arnold rightly points a finger. He fails to make the quantum leap: we had and have a civil service secretariat and political hierarchy whose education and moral ethos was instilled by the religious orders who were supposedly in the dock of moral opinion. All Irish hierarchies, civil, medical, and educational, share the core ethos of the religious orders responsible for the abuse. Their judgments will never be objective: they have been schooled precisely not to be objective when it comes to core value.
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