Royal Commission must ensure 'no more lives are ruined'

Queensland Times
February 24, 2014

http://www.qt.com.au/news/kids-must-be-protected/2177385/

THE Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Brisbane has spent a full week probing deeply into what went so terribly wrong at a Catholic primary school in Toowoomba.

Convicted pedophile Gerard Byrnes is serving 10 years in jail for the sexual abuse and rape of 13 young girls.

Readers of the Chronicle will have been horrified to see how these 13 young girls were failed by the system and those people who were charged with protecting them.

The commission will most likely come back with several recommendations in about a month.

This is not the place to pre-empt what those recommendations may be.

But this inquiry must be successful in one most important area.

It must ensure that no school and its leaders can ever again fail children they are charged to protect.

No more lives must be ruined.