Ireland and Child Abuse

New York Times
January 31, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/opinion/ireland-and-child-abuse.html?_r=1

For years, the government of Ireland has denied liability for child sexual abuse by teachers in state-financed schools managed by the Roman Catholic Church. The European Court of Human Rights punctured this denial Tuesday with a finding that the Irish government, in financing and regulating the education of youngsters, had “an inherent obligation” to protect them, and owed compensation to a victim whose case was rejected as groundless by Ireland’s highest court.

The European court pointed to the obvious: The Irish government is responsible for failing to act against inhuman and degrading treatment of citizens that is specifically barred under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The court ordered more than $150,000 in compensation and court costs for Louise O’Keeffe, who had been repeatedly abused 40 years ago as a 9-year-old at the national school at Dunderrow, County Cork.

The abuser was a lay teacher, Leo Hickey, who was not charged for 20 years, even though parents had complained about him to a school administrator in the early 1970s. The scandal finally broke into the open in the 1990s and the abuser was sentenced to three years in prison after being charged with 386 criminal offenses involving 21 youngsters.

It is particularly telling that the human rights court found the government, based on “a significant rate” of child-abuse prosecutions prior to the 1970s, was familiar with the problem and “had to have been aware of” the need to protect children even as it denied responsibility. Effective state mechanisms for parents to raise alarms should have been enacted well before the Dunderrow school scandal, the court noted. In contrast, the Irish Supreme Court dismissed liability claims in the last decade by saying the primary school system had to be viewed in its “specific context” of Irish history and the Catholic Church’s privileged position in Irish society.

The human rights ruling put the issue in a more responsible and just context. It presumably opens the government to hundreds more liability claims in Ireland, and possibly even in other nations where church and state allowed sexual abuse in schools to go unpunished.