AN OPEN and critical approach should be maintained at all times to any system of childcare and methods should be devised so that it can be carefully assessed as to its success or failure, a High Court judge told a conference on child protection yesterday.
The chairman of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Mr Justice Seán Ryan, said it was important there was a clearly understood line of authority and control of any system of childcare and child protection to ensure accountability.
He said his inquiry team, when examining child abuse at the industrial and reformatory schools between 1936 and the 1970s, found the religious congregations were the true owners, not only of the institutions but of the system of which they were part.
The Department of Education had effectively ceded control of the system and its operation to the resident managers who were in a position to threaten to close a particular institution or even all of the institutions if they did not like something the department was proposing.
Mr Justice Ryan said those devising, supervising and operating the childcare system today should be clear as to what they are seeking to achieve and they should also be trying to devise a way of identifying success or failure.
Speaking in Cork at a conference entitled “Protecting Children Post Ryan: Real or Virtual Change in an Era of Social Crisis”, Mr Justice Ryan said often when looking at the effectiveness of systems, people tended to overlook how individuals discharged their duties.“In the search for grand acts and gestures, it can be forgotten that if everybody does his or her job satisfactorily and responsibly, and is permitted to do so, the chances of abuse happening or, if it does happen, that it will go undetected, are greatly reduced.”
Mr Justice Ryan told the conference organised by the HSE, University College Cork and the Irish Association of Social Workers, that the inquiry into child abuse revealed failings that were both individual and institutional, congregational and departmental.
“Each contributed its own snow to the avalanche of abuse, the failure to detect and the failure to report. The system produced some abuses and facilitated others. There were failures of regulation, supervision and inspection as well as failure of management in individual schools.”
Mr Justice Ryan said he believed the Ryan report was “a necessary process at this stage in our history” and it was important that the State undertook such an exploration in the interests of reconciliation and improvement.
“Although the public may have suspected that abuse had taken place and it had been fully revealed previously, it seems clear that they were shocked at the extent of the abuse, its systemic nature, its pervasiveness and the elaborate measures that were taken to cover it up.”
He said the Ryan report not just confirmed what was suspected but went further in giving details, often taken from the congregations’ own records, thus confirming that the congregations were aware of the abuse, which added to the public outcry.
“The fact that the abuse had been denied and that victims had been portrayed as guilty of gross exaggeration in their claims, served to increase the public indignation at what had taken place in the institutions,” said Mr Justice Ryan.
He said while each of the institutions had its own distinguishing features, his overall impression was one of loss and missed opportunities. “The sense I have is of loss: lost opportunity, lost talent and capacity to learn; time and effort spent on incarceration; waste of money and resources; abandonment of children who needed some expenditure of attention, care, interest and resources to give them a chance in life.”