DERMOT KEOGH ON SEX SCANDALS IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

[ Dr Dermot Keogh is Professor of History at University College Cork and author of 'Twentieth Century Ireland'. It is clear that he does NOT accept the standard narrative regarding Ireland's child abuse scandal/witch-hunt. However he uses Aesopian language rather than spell out the witch-hunting reality. Thus "Dear Daughter' features a claim by Christine Buckley that Sister Xavieria caned her so severely that the entire side of her leg was split open from her hip to her knee; she was then treated in the casualty department of the local hospital and received 80 to 120 stitches. Ms Buckley produced no medical evidence to support this bizarre claim and the surgeon who ran the casualty department has stated that he never came across such a case.

Dermot Keogh merely states that " the coverage in [Dear Daughter] was neither comprehensive nor definitive and it raised many questions".

It certainly did!

Rory Connor
30 January 2008 ]

Extract from essay 'Ireland at the Turn of the Century: 1994-2001' by Dermot Keogh. (This is chapter 24 of the book 'The Course of Irish History' by T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin)

In the 1990s, the clerical Catholic Church was forced to confront a number of scandals of various degrees of severity. High-profile paternity suits ensured that the private lives of the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, and well-known priest Father Michael Cleary were splashed all over the front pages of Irish newspapers. Serious allegations were also made against state-funded and religious-run orphanages and industrial schools. Many of the allegations related to events going back to the 1940s and 1950s.

Two television programmes set the framework for the public discussion on this area. Dear Daughter was broadcast on RTE on 28 February 1996. In it Christine Buckley told the story of her time in St. Vincent's industrial school, Goldenbridge, Dublin, run by the Sisters of Mercy. Her account was an indictment of the manner in which the school allegedly operated. But the coverage in the programme was neither comprehensive nor definitive and it raised many questions.

On 9 May 1996 allegations of abuse were made against the Sisters of Charity orphanage at Madonna House in Dublin. A report documented some fifteen cases. In April and May 1999, RTE broadcast Mary Raftery's three-part documentary entitled 'States of Fear' on the history of the industrial-school system in Ireland. The reaction to the programmes was extensive and intensive, in the newspapers and on radio. It was followed by a number of books on the subject. ***

However, taken as a whole, these commentaries do not constitute a reliable history of the industrial-school system in Ireland. That may emerge from the commission to inquire into childhood abuse set uyp by the government in May 1999, when the Taoiseach apologized to the victims of childhood abuse on behalf of the State and its citizens "for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue."

*** Based on 'States of Fear', Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan published 'Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools' in 1999. In 1998 Susan McKay's 'Sophia's Choice' was published. The following year, Bernadette Fahy wrote 'Freedom of Angels: Surviving Goldenbridge Orphanage'.