ANALYSIS:The State agencies so feared religious orders that they utterly failed to protect children, writes PATSY McGARRY.
IT TAKES an extraordinary perversity of nature to thwart the instinctive drive to nurture and care for the young. What the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Reportdoes is document such a systematic perversity of nature. That it does so with such clarity and honesty is to the credit of Justice Seán Ryan and his fellow commissioners.
What it presents, and in such detail, is something which will forever remain a stain on the Irish character. The report illustrates, again and again, how through all the decades of our independence between 1922 up to the mid-1970s we not only failed to treat those tens of thousands of children in our residential institutions equally, we failed to cherish them at all.
Rather, those agencies of State charged with a responsibility to do so, in particular the Department of Education, not only failed in that basic duty but colluded with those regimes which perpetrated a reign of sustained terror that was the daily lot of those children.
The department did so out of “deference”. The commission report concluded that “the deferential and submissive attitude of the Department of Education toward the [religious] congregations compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and monitoring of the schools”.
The residential schools were “accorded a low status” within the department which “generally saw itself as facilitating the congregations and the resident managers [of the institutions]”. Further, the system of departmental funding of the institutions through capitation grants encouraged demands by the resident managers for children to be committed to the schools for economic reasons.
But, whither this deference?
It was due to the extraordinarily powerful position of the Catholic Church in this State throughout all of the relevant decades. It was the dominant body in Irish society, to which all deferred out of respect as much as fear. Throughout most of those decades, the Catholic Church was by far the main provider of secondary education in the Republic. This situation persisted up to and for some time after the introduction of free education in 1967.
It meant that most people in the Civil Service had been educated at secondary school
by priests, Brothers or nuns. Most of those people would never have been employed by the Civil Service except for that education. Clearly, they remembered their debt.
They were the products of the more positive side of the Catholic Church’s contribution to Irish society at the time. Its congregations and secular clergy gave immense service in areas such as education, healthcare and the social services when the State either could not and certainly did not provide these for its people.
The many great schools, bigger hospitals, and widespread social services were gleaming achievements of the Catholic Church in Ireland during those decades and a massive contribution to the welfare of the Irish people, at home and also abroad.
But there was also the parallel, deeply dark underbelly of the church at that time, as disclosed yesterday. The commission report records such levels of depravity and barbarity in the treatment of thousands of children by Brothers, priests and nuns that one can only conclude that it illustrates nothing less than an utterly dysfunctional and deeply corrupt institution.
It is such corruption as results from the regular and unaccountable exercise of absolute power. Then, as the great, Catholic, historian Lord Acton observed “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The report illustrates voluminously the absolute corruption of an absolutely powerful institution.
While the Catholic Church in Ireland is in a very different place today, there were demonstrations of old attitudes during the public hearings of the commission’s Investigation Committee, particularly on the part of the Christian Brothers and Oblate fathers. While they did co-operate eventually and fully with the committee and the commission, this was with a sustained and graceless resistance.
But, it has to be asked of the people who perpetrated the abusive acts described in the report, how could such men and women, the great majority of whom entered the congregations with a determination to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, descend to such levels of behaviour?
What was it that so dehumanised these men and women that they could perpetrate sustained terror on children? Did a dark theology of fallen human nature with a propensity to evil allow a climate where such viciousness could be consistently visited on children? Was there a moral snobbery at work which allowed barbarity where “lesser” children were concerned?
We can only speculate for now. What seems clear is that yesterday’s report spells the death knell for a form of Irish Catholicism which was dominant for so long. Along with the 2005 Ferns Report, and the upcoming reports on clerical child sex abuse in Dublin and Cloyne dioceses, yesterday’s report has ensured that the future will see a less clerical Catholic Church in Ireland. And less “deference” too.