The five-volume Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is a vast document. It attempts to cover six of the 10 years since Bertie Ahern made his public apology to those who had suffered abuse in the industrial schools and, together with Ms Justice Mary Lafoy’s Third Interim Report, published in December 2003, it completes the record of the Commission’s work.
Its main achievement is the painstaking and imperfect knitting together of various strands of testimony about a selection of industrial schools where abuse was central. Their names are well-known to us. Much of the testimony coming from their former inmates contained in this report is also well-known. It was exposed, debated and argued over at public hearings of the Investigation Committee of the Commission. These began under Ms Justice Mary Lafoy and went on under Mr Justice Seán Ryan after he took over the chairmanship.
This testimony is now presented in extensive and sickening detail about Artane, Letterfrack, Tralee, Carriglea, Glin, Salthill, Cabra, Daingean, Marlborough House, Upton, Ferryhouse, Greenmount, Lota, Goldenbridge, Cappoquin, Clifden, Newtownforbes, Dundalk, Kilkenny and Beechpark. From the earlier Third Interim Report there is the further testimony of what happened in another bleak, grim place: Baltimore Fisheries School.
The Report
The two volumes covering these institutions run to 1,400 pages and they deal with only a selection of testimony by inmates of the 60 industrial schools and reformatories listed and mapped at the beginning of The Irish Gulag and spread across the whole country. There is a disproportionate emphasis on the institutions for boys, where much of the abuse was pervasively gross; but violence in the girls’ industrial schools was also terrible and merited far greater attention than it has been given. Confronted by the massive amount of material, it is easy to overlook the central contribution brought to the Commission’s work by Mr Justice Seán Ryan, and this was to short circuit the process of examination, bringing it to an earlier conclusion. This was not something sought by the abused themselves. They spent the first four years of the nine-year period of investigation watching the State, through the Department of Education, delaying the Commission’s work under Ms Justice Mary Lafoy and had already lost patience when Seán Ryan took over.
A further 400 pages in the third volume, detailing the work of the Commission’s Confidential Committee, gives harrowing personal data, not specifically related to places but presented on a thematic basis. Chapters define the family backgrounds of those incarcerated. The forms of abuse used on male victims are separated into one chapter. What happened to females is contained in another. There is some detail given of positive experiences. The Commission’s remit covered a range of institutions beyond the industrial school system itself, recounting abuse experiences in special needs schools, children’s homes, foster care, hospitals, primary and secondary schools, and residential laundries.
It is in this volume that the thorny issue of committal is addressed, though only in a technical sense, under the heading ’Pathways to Industrial and Reformatory Schools’. It was a massive process masquerading as ’care’ but in fact it was what Frank Duff, the founder of the Legion of Mary, described to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid-both men were opponents of the industrial school system-as the ’shovelling in’ of children to these iniquitous places. The committal issue-seen in the eyes of many victims of the system as by far the most violent abuse of their liberty and rights-is not analysed from this point of view. It is treated as a factual matter, one of the contributory ’pathways’ into the system.
Public attention, since the publication of the report, has understandably focused on this harrowing testimony which has shocked the country all over again and probably more comprehensively than ever before, notwithstanding the fact that the story, or stories, of industrial school abuse have been matters of public concern for well over ten years.
The Government and the Commission
What has been more difficult to grapple with are the issues of blame and the fundamental question facing the Irish public: in whose interest has this commission been working? Mr Justice Seán Ryan set out to work on behalf of the Government. He was requested to do so in ’the interests of the abused’.
To this entirely acceptable objective the Government added a second. This was to complete the Commission’s work ’within a reasonable period and not incur exorbitant costs’.
The conditions were contradictory. The position of the Government, in setting them, was dishonest. For the previous four years, through the actions of the Department of Education, the Government had consistently delayed the workings of the Commission, limiting it to the completion of just one industrial school survey, that of the Baltimore Fisheries School. There were no demands from the organisations acting on behalf of the victims for ’a reasonable timeframe’, or for consistency between a ’proper investigation’, however that is defined, and the avoidance of ’exorbitant costs’. The victims had been frustrated on the issue of a speeding up of the procedure, not because of timeframes or methodology but simply because the Government had failed to think through its operation of the Commission, fund it properly and answer simple queries coming from Ms Justice Mary Lafoy.
Four years had been largely wasted as a result of Government inaction and Department of Education frustration of the processes established by law to further the aims of the Commission. Ms Justice Mary Lafoy confronted this inexcusable blocking of due process and resigned. Mr Justice Seán Ryan set the process on a new path, claiming that the amended legislation would ’focus the Investigation on its core function’. This was to inquire into abuse of children in institutions. But this is what had been going on all along, only delayed by the refusal of the Department of Education to co-operate with the first chairperson of the Commission.
The abused are not, and were not, fools. They had reacted strongly to the delays under Ms Justice Mary Lafoy. Not knowing the background until she published the full details of the Department of Education’s frustration of her work, which she did in her Third Interim Report in December 2003, the victims blamed her for prevarication and worse. When the truth came out, they lost confidence in the Commission. The avoidance of ’exorbitant costs’ in the light of other tribunals was a piece of nonsense. The idea that this new Seán Ryan Commission was dedicated to ’the interests of the abused’ seem to them perverse. The introduction of ’Modules’, described as ’logical units for hearings’, was also scoffed at by the victims. Mr Justice Ryan promised the ’publication of interim reports as the work proceeded’. This did not happen. He also promised to establish ’"trust" between the parties as to the fairness of the hearings’. In all my dealings with the victims of abuse since 2003, I can honestly say that I have never heard the word ’trust’ applied to the relationship-such as it is-between the victims and the Commission.
The Flawed Report
The Ryan Report is flawed because of this. Mr Justice Seán Ryan started out on his revised operation of the Commission on the basis that he was responding to the Government’s attempts to paper over the collapse of integrity and trust between the State and the previous chairperson of the Commission, Ms Justice Mary Lafoy. In her long letter of resignation, dealt with in detail in two chapters of The Irish Gulag, Mary Lafoy raises the spectre of this possibility. It is not something that can be definitively argued or resolved, but the evidence of a built-in malfunction of the Commission can be adduced from other more tangible shortcomings.
These include the defective historical analysis by the Commission of how the appalling circumstances in the industrial schools were allowed to develop. They also include the seriously flawed examination of the evidence of the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, and several of his ministers and public servants over how the process of reconciliation and recompense started. Full Cabinet and Cabinet subcommittee papers were neither sought nor analysed. Testimony that was faulty or questionable was not subjected to forensic examination. Much of the evidence published on this in the early pages of volume I of the report appears to be selective, based on recollections of different key figures unsupported by the necessary memoranda and agendas of meetings. Some of this has been in the public domain-since I put it there-for the last six years. Yet a very imperfect account is given in the Ryan Report.
The full details of the Indemnity Agreement and of the emergence of a compensation scheme for victims is also flawed. There is evidence in the Ryan Report of how this came about. It is in conflict with evidence that Ms Justice Mary Lafoy refers to in her letter of resignation in 2003. We do not know where the idea came from or from whom and this bears heavily on another issue, that of the so-called Secret Deal, the indemnifying of the religious orders by the State and the creation of a huge imbalance between the State and the religious orders in terms of who would pay the cost of recompense. The final set of circumstances was that the State, in a ratio of 10:1, would bear the cost of claims by victims.
The full details of this seriously misguided deal were published by the Irish Independent in 2003. The newspaper estimated at the time a cost of €1 billion which has proved reasonably accurate. It was also crystal clear at the time that the religious were not going to budge on their indemnity provisions. The State covered up embarrassment at its foolishness as best it could. While the report attempts a rather loose and uncertain survey of this lamentable exposure of the taxpayer to enormous costs, it does not make clear and appropriate judgments about what was done.
Errors and Omissions
There is cursory and inaccurate attention in the Ryan Report to matters that have a historic importance. Much of this will come to light as the extensive document is more fully analysed. At this stage, it worth identifying the inexcusable examples.
One of these concerns the Kennedy Report. This report, published in 1970 and chaired by District Justice Eileen Kennedy, president of the District Court, failed to tackle any of the key problems in the industrial school system and excluded from consideration the most serious problem faced by the children: corporal punishment. Though members of the Kennedy Commission knew a good deal about this and are on record discussing the punishment circumstances in Daingean reformatory, their recollections are not recorded in the report. The closure of Daingean is recommended, but mainly because of antiquated plumbing and other physical defects. The fact that the children were flogged mercilessly is not recorded.
Furthermore, the Kennedy Report published the Rules and Regulations for the Certified Industrial Schools in Ireland but excised-and it can only have been deliberate-the key rule covering corporal punishment. This was a disgraceful abuse of public power and a suppression of the true facts. The unthinkable happened: a State regulation was included as an appendix in the Kennedy Report without the most important paragraph, on corporal punishment, in it. Corporal punishment was not discussed in the report either.
None of this is corrected, rectified or challenged. The Commission seems not to have noticed. Its members’ comments refer mainly to future prognostications rather than the non-findings of criminality, abuse and deprivation that existed in the industrial schools the Kennedy Commission members visited.
The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse sees the Kennedy Commission quite differently, admiring it and using words like ’pivotal’ when in fact it achieved nothing significant beyond proposing an enhancement of the deception about the nature of the institutions by renaming them! ’Industrial Schools’ were to be called ’National Boarding Schools’ and the ’Detention Order’ was to be called an ’Admission Order’. This was not done by the Cussen Report of 1936 and 30 years later the Kennedy Commission followed the same course. It did recommend closures, but they were slow to be implemented.
The Commission is categorically wrong in saying that the Rules and Regulations were ’unambiguous in the restrictions placed on corporal punishment’. From first to last they were ambiguous; they did allow extremes of punishment within the rules quite apart from the fact that the rules were widely ignored. At one level this was a departmental failure to inspect and change punishment regulations, as happened in the UK system, ironically under Winston Churchill when he was at the British Home Office!
Living History
So much for history, one might say. But in fact living history is what the Commission was engaged in throughout its nine years and its record will no more satisfy the abused than it will the general public.
All the known conclusions to be found or drawn from testimony given to the Commission are listed in the report, as are the same dismal points that have been made over the past decade, and earlier, in the pioneering documentaries on life in the industrial school system. Yes, there was abuse. Seán Ryan, at the outset of his chairmanship, said we had to ascertain this and it was done. Yes, the Department of Education behaved badly, was deferential and submissive toward the religious congregations and failed to regulate or protect the children’s lives.
The Irish industrial school system flourished because the religious orders wanted it to flourish and the State ignored the alternative approaches which had been steadily developed in the United Kingdom but were notably ignored by Tomás Derrig, Fianna Fáil Minister for Education, who presided over many of the most terrible events in the system. This divergence between an old-fashioned and pernicious religious control in the Irish system and a more secular and but caring approach in the United Kingdom is not properly examined in the report.
The Commission confronts the issue of sexual abuse and gives a comprehensive account of the extent and depravity of what remains-for most of those who suffered-the worst aspect of their lives, resulting in lifelong psychological damage and inhibiting permanently their capacity to adjust and lead a fully normal life. But this confrontation is far from complete in its analysis and in its facing of difficult general areas of judgment and conclusive findings.
I have engaged with many tribunal findings at the highest level in Irish society and there is variation of competence and courage. Mr Justice Brian McCracken, for example, did more in a single page of his report on Haughey and money than Mr Justice Ryan has done in 2,500 pages.
Failing to confront the State
Despite this high level of findings, Mr Justice Seán Ryan fails to confront the State on its most blatant lack of transparency and where it has been most vulnerable because of misleading and dishonest presentation of its purposes and intents. The examples are in respect of the questionable sequence of State initiatives, including departmental and Cabinet procedures leading up to the 1999 Apology, the pieces of legislation setting up and then amending the Commission and the Residential Institutions Redress Board, and the contemptible Secret Deal, negotiated and signed outside of Cabinet control and without Cabinet approval.
Mr Justice Ryan has also failed to confront the Roman Catholic Church at the highest level, where it not only allowed this truly inhuman situation to exist in the industrial schools, but actively protected the abusers. It did so through a papal policy of secrecy, whose very existence was a secret. Only by knowing a good deal about this are the enormities committed in the industrial schools to be understood.
In making these points, which are critical of the Commission, it is necessary to bear in mind the scale of the cruelty, the physical and sexual abuse, the neglect and the poverty of education offered in what were euphemistically known as ’schools’. As the Ferns Report showed, the clerical abusers in Wexford were equal in number to 1 in 4 of the total clergy strength there. The mention of about 800 abusers in orphanages suggests an even higher ratio, since we have to bear in mind that the number of nuns and brothers staffing the industrial schools was quite small. In Ferryhouse, for example, there was an average intake of children that fluctuated between a maximum of 200 but was mostly around 150. With a total staff number of around 12, and given the scale and frequency of abuse allegations, it would be difficult for the religious staff to have fulfilled their work as well as carrying out the widespread abuse. The burden of abusing was a non-stop operation.
If we extrapolate from this that the national staffing complement for the industrial schools might have been about 1,800 at its lowest, possibly rising to as many as 2,400, that would mean that the ratio of abusers-perhaps as many as 800-was worse even than in Ferns. We are possibly looking at a 1 in 3 ratio. A hospital where 1 in 3 of the staff tortured patients would be decommissioned at once. This never happened with the religious orders.
Prisoner Children
One of the more significant undertakings the chairperson, Mr Justice Seán Ryan, gave about his investigation involved the committal of the children by the courts. He said that it was important ’not to ignore the methods by which children came to be placed in institutions’. This issue of committal was never meant to be part of the process. It came far too close to the derelictions of the State-its betrayal of the innocent children-than was comfortable.
Ms Justice Mary Lafoy covered it, but only in a detailed listing of the various legislative provisions by which children were committed and how they operated. Since this was already in the public domain, what Seán Ryan said was seen at the time, and now appears, in the words ’not to ignore the methods’, to be an extension of what she had done.
It has not proved to be so in the Final Report. Setting aside everything done to the children during their incarceration, nothing was as terrible or alarming as the events which led so many of them to lose their liberty by being placed in the hands of the guards and taken away to what were child prisons, there to serve terms of up to 14 years.
The children were not represented in the courts. Their circumstances were not properly investigated. They were, as the founder of the Legion of Mary, Frank Duff, asserted in a letter to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, ’shovelled into the industrial schools’.
This matter remains obscure and inadequately dealt with. Answers as to how it happened, and why, remain in the future. Mr Justice Ryan himself said that the importance of the issue was hard to exaggerate and that it would be unsatisfactory to ignore it. He was to seek an amendment to the Act. It was not made.
It is so central and so significant to those who have survived the abuse that it merits further consideration. It is a far more important question than the one that gained considerable public attention after the publication of the report, namely the Secret Deal.
We have to focus on the fact that, among all the terrible things that happened to thousands of boys and girls on their way into the juvenile prisons in Ireland-those places that masqueraded as industrial ’schools’-probably the worst of all was the committal of those children in the District Courts. Not all went that way but a substantial number of those recorded in the Ryan Report did. In the august atmosphere of a courtroom, with guards, priests, supposed social workers and guardians of good Catholic family life looking on, the child, alone or with siblings but without proper legal defence, was removed from the limited life they had led up to that point, and sent for years to a prison in all but name, inadequate and cruel in almost every aspect. Many of them simply became slave labour.
It was not open to the Commission to examine this terrible court event, despite the fact that it overshadowed the lives of the victims. The court process was never satisfactorily sorted out in terms of its criminal implications and whether or not the long incarceration stained the children with a criminal record.
Woods
Michael Woods, in the drafting of the Commission legislation, said in the Dáil that a legal or constitutional review of these court findings was ’unacceptable’. This was obvious to everyone. The court judgments may have been wrong, but they were final. What Woods did was to use a tenuous constitutional doubt quite improperly to frustrate the entirely legitimate role of the Commission, which would have been to examine whether or not the process had been wrong. But on the basis of a spurious representation of some kind of constitutional ’doubt’, the issue of committals was excised from the legislation and placed outside the remit of the two judges, Mary Lafoy and Seán Ryan.
Mary Lafoy tried to put it back in again, and did publish some detail about how the committals worked in her Third Interim Report. Seán Ryan said the issue needed to be examined in greater depth, but did not do so in any comprehensive or meaningful way.
Thus Michael Woods was able, on a false representation of the facts, to block off perhaps the most significant area of State impropriety and possibly human rights abuse, together with misuse of the existing laws on child imprisonment.
On every other issue covered by the vast Final Report, there exists a scale of balances between the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish State, with the two hugely powerful institutions flipping and flopping this way and that in terms of who was most to blame. Inevitably, from any reading of the account that is published, the Church carries the greater share of blame. In fact, this is wrong and misguided.
Failed in its duty
It was the duty of the Commission to investigate and make public the inescapable reservations about the political dimension of what happened. It has failed to do so. The political analysis in the report is flaccid and ambivalent. There is no reliable examination of Bertie Ahern and the ministers in his first administration, from 1997 to 2002, undertaken by the report. Instead, it relies on opinion and speculation, with one witness giving his view, another witness giving a slightly different point of view. And we are talking about the highest officers in the State: the Taoiseach, his ministers and senior civil servants.
The Commission does not challenge such testimony. The section headed ’State Evidence’ is unreliable, selective and flawed. Evidence critical of Government and published by myself in the Irish Independent during the nine-year period covered by the Commission in its work is reflected, when reflected at all, by imprecise and flabby presentation of data and selective use of statements given to the Commission by the key political people responsible for what was being done. The truth is not tested, the factual justification not examined.
The inexcusable line adopted by Michael Woods is neither investigated as it should be nor challenged or confronted. Within the wider terms of reference thought out by Mr Justice Seán Ryan and put into the amending legislation, which changed the remit and direction of the Commission, he created greater freedom to act than had been available to Mary Lafoy. He did not use it properly or effectively.
The report contains nothing about the steady flow of reform in the British system of child care, begun by Winston Churchill when he was Home Secretary-and this was before Ireland’s independence-and continued throughout the grim period in which Tomás Derrig was Minister for Education. From 1932 Derrig placed an iron fist on top of the smouldering dustbin of industrial school illegality and did nothing at all. Irregularly, cases came up in the courts, the press and the Dáil that cried out for investigation. It was always refused by him. It was generally refused by other ministers. Nothing is said of this in the report.
Once again, we are rerunning clerical abuse and letting the State off the hook-and not just the State in the period covered by the Commission, beginning in 1936, but also the iniquities of the State during the last nine years, allowing the Department of Education to control and monitor the investigation of its own shortcomings, delaying the workings of the Commission for three years, changing direction with amending legislation and without the approval of the victims, and now, since publication of the report, demonstrating that no one in the Government knows which set of responses they should be using. The report is lame and ambivalent on this area of criticism.
No matter what we have lived through, in terms of revelation about what the victims suffered in this territory of abuse and cruelty, neglect and indifference, over many years now, it still comes back to haunt and worry us. But in asking: how did Ireland permit this regime and why did no one stop it? we need to confront the glaring fact that the story has not been properly told and the evidence not analysed adequately.
In the face of this, the present public outrage-greater than it was before we set out on this path of supposed reconciliation and healing-is entirely legitimate and justified. Unhappily, it is also largely futile.
The Real Culprit
The real culprit was and is the State, which is still floundering over child protection. The State approved, backed and used, intemperately and without consideration of the lives of victims, our legal system to incarcerate vast numbers of children. It was done for largely trivial, superficial and unresearched reasons and on the entirely meretricious excuse that it was for the good of the children. It was not; and the people responsible, from the Department of Education, from within successive governments, also within the judiciary and the police and the Christian aid societies and organisations, knew this. How well they knew it. Everyone in the country had a whiff in their nostrils of the fear emanating from behind the high walls of the industrial schools.
The report will bring no closure for the victims. They have read it all before. They distrust almost everyone involved. They will go to their graves carrying the sentences passed on them as children, part of a burden of guilt and inadequacy that has been deeply embedded in their lives and has run like tainted blood through their veins. It will do so until their hearts stop beating.
I was with John Kelly in Daingean to hear him describe the awful beatings he suffered there on the fake marble staircases from which his screams of fear and pain echoed up into the dormitories so that every inmate knew what they might expect for trivial misdemeanours.
For many people, John Kelly has become the living and outspoken embodiment of the ghostly screams and unending tears that are now part of the Ryan Report. The bulk of its achievement is this record.
On that occasion, which I will never forget, there was a third person present, Tommy O’Reilly, from Enniscorthy. After the visit, he wrote to tell me of his acute distress on his way home when he stopped at the roadside to shed tears over what had happened to him. He has since died of cancer. He was a gentle person, puzzled to the end by the levels of cruelty that so damaged his life. His main feeling was one of incomprehension at the failure of the Oblates of Mary to give him any kind of respect or help towards his future life. The final challenge to his human rights was when a brother brought in to him, at the time of his departure from Daingean, an Irish Army uniform and told him to put it on. He was to be drafted, against his will, into the Defence Forces. This conscription into one of the State’s arms of law and order was a last, ironic humiliation not envisaged or covered by the Ryan Report. It was an abuse, as had been the court appearance that started his Daingean sentence. He remembered until his death the shame he felt at this ultimate arbitrary act.
