Terrible abuse of victims cannot be dismissed like this

Tuesday May 23rd 2006

THE Christian Brothers have launched a vigorous defence of their past institutional record as carers of children at the public hearings of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse.

A similar denial of abuses was vehemently made last week at the hearings by the Sisters of Mercy in regard to their running of St Vincent's industrial school in Goldenbridge, Dublin.

Taken together, the stance being adopted by these two pillars of the historical Irish educational system smacks of a deliberate policy to mitigate the scale of physical and sexual abuse endured by children in the middle of the last century.

In effect, this twin rearguard operation from the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy amount to an official rewriting of the truly shocking case studies of severe sexual and physical abuse that have come into the public domain in the past decade. In particular, the storm of public rage which followed the screening of RTE's States of Fear in 1999 led to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's public apology on behalf of the nation to abuse survivors, the announcement of the Government's establishment of the inquiry, and the establishment of a Redress Board to provide compensation to victims.

Yesterday, however, Brother David Gibson rounded on the media, avaricious lawyers and false claimants for producing an exaggerated level of alleged abuses by priests, brothers and nuns.

To back up his point, Br Gibson claimed that the Letterfrack industrial school in Co Galway had received only three abuse complaints before the Brothers made a public apology to former pupils in 1998.

But this figure rose to nine, and then soared to 440 after the Taoiseach's announcement.

This was the bricks and straw on which Brother Gibson accuses many victims of being motivated by financial gain, and some solicitors of touting for business in pubs in England and Ireland by giving out names of Christian Brothers, and, later, of doling out copies of the RTE television documentary.

On this basis, he maintains that the Christians Brothers have "a strong suspicion of very big contamination of evidence". No doubt, there is an element of truth in Brother Gibson's claim.

But that element is only a small trickle compared with the torrent of stories told by victims in print and on radio programmes. So it is not surprising that the victims are exploding with anger at the effrontery of the religious orders in attempting to rewrite history and cast the victims, journalists and lawyers as the villains.

As John Barrett, a campaigner on behalf of survivors of abuse, said last night, from the start, they were looking for justice, not money. We are far from achieving those goals. And in the process, the politicians have scored a massive own goal by allowing the taxpayer, rather than the religious orders, to pick up the bulk of the financial tab.

John Cooney

? Irish Independent