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Child abuse revelations stun church in Ireland
Source: Agencies |
May 21, 2009, Thursday
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A commission report into the abuse of thousands of Irish children in Roman Catholic institutions was published yesterday after a nine-year investigation repeatedly delayed by church lawsuits, missing documentation and alleged government obstruction.
The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse released a 2,575-page report in an attempt at a comprehensive portrait of the sexual, physical and emotional damage inflicted on children consigned to the country's defunct network of reformatories, workhouses, orphanages and other church-run institutions from the 1930s to 1990s.
Most of the children were ordered into church care because of school truancy, petty crimes or because they were the offspring of unwed mothers. Many faced regimes of terror involving ritual beatings and intimidation. Some of those victims say they feel hopeful.
Christine Buckley, who was one of the first to break silence in the early 1990s on the church's institutional abuse of children, said the report's verdict on church and government failings should demonstrate "whether the journey for justice, undertaken by so many and for so long, has at last been successful."
She, and other campaigners, said it was critical that the truth of their brutal childhoods be placed indisputably on the public record after decades of dispute from the religious orders - principally the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy nuns - that ran Ireland's 19th Century industrial schools and other state-funded refuges for Ireland's most vulnerable children.
Typically, children at such facilities stopped receiving any formal education by age 12.
"The depth and duration of the abuse endured by our children in these institutions beggars belief," said Maeve Lewis, executive director of an abuse-victims support group called One in Four.
The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse released a 2,575-page report in an attempt at a comprehensive portrait of the sexual, physical and emotional damage inflicted on children consigned to the country's defunct network of reformatories, workhouses, orphanages and other church-run institutions from the 1930s to 1990s.
Most of the children were ordered into church care because of school truancy, petty crimes or because they were the offspring of unwed mothers. Many faced regimes of terror involving ritual beatings and intimidation. Some of those victims say they feel hopeful.
Christine Buckley, who was one of the first to break silence in the early 1990s on the church's institutional abuse of children, said the report's verdict on church and government failings should demonstrate "whether the journey for justice, undertaken by so many and for so long, has at last been successful."
She, and other campaigners, said it was critical that the truth of their brutal childhoods be placed indisputably on the public record after decades of dispute from the religious orders - principally the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy nuns - that ran Ireland's 19th Century industrial schools and other state-funded refuges for Ireland's most vulnerable children.
Typically, children at such facilities stopped receiving any formal education by age 12.
"The depth and duration of the abuse endured by our children in these institutions beggars belief," said Maeve Lewis, executive director of an abuse-victims support group called One in Four.
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