The Spiritan religious order has been accused of adding to the suffering of survivors abused in their schools through ongoing delays in announcing a redress scheme.
The Restore Together group, which represents survivors of abuse in Blackrock College, Willow Park School, Rockwell College in Tipperary, along with St Mary’s College, St Michael’s College and Templeogue College in Dublin, accused the order of a “lack of urgency” in the matter.
By November last year, 359 survivors of abuse at Spiritan schools had come forward, including 347 disclosed in the scoping inquiry report on abuse at private fee-paying schools published in September 2024.
In a statement on Friday, Restore Together said the Spiritan order last June issued a public statement about making plans to commence a redress scheme for victims or survivors of abuse suffered at Spiritan schools. It said the order hoped to have an update by “the end of the summer”.
READ MORE
The group said the Spiritans had not made any statement and since the end of the summer and it had been seeking a meeting with the Spiritans “to discuss urgently progressing the agreed restorative programme, but to no avail”.
This “lack of urgency is seen and felt as a further abuse of victims/survivors, one of control, by the order that abused them sexually decades ago”, the group said, adding that the Spiritans have had “more than enough time to properly address it”.
In the meantime victims, survivors and their families “continue to suffer trauma daily”.
This “ongoing lack of urgency” on the Spiritans’ part is “not acceptable to victims/survivors, their families and friends or Restore Together”.
It called for the timely delivery of “the full programme the Spiritans have signed up” for. Otherwise, the groups said, its benefit “will be diluted, or even lost if people are made to wait too long and fight for every element of it”.
[ Spiritans accused of putting own interests before those of abuse victimsOpens in new window ]
The group said it has been more than four years since Restore Together first engaged with the Spiritans on this, while it is “three years since we launched the Restorative Process Framework with them”.
It noted that most victims and survivors are “60 or older and have carried this burden for decades”.
Last June, in an open letter to survivors of abuse by members and employees of the Spiritan congregation, Provincial Fr Brendan Carr announced “a restorative framework which we hope can help all to arrive at a different place in this painful and difficult journey”.
It was his “sincere hope”, Fr Carr said then, that by the end of the summer he could “provide a further, more detailed update of the progress we are making in forging new paths to create a just redress scheme”.
In response to queries from The Irish Times, a spokesman for the Spiritans said they would “not be comment” on the latest Restore Together statement.
