Christian Brothers also deserve fair treatment

On Thursday last Tom Hayes, secretary to the Alliance Victim Support Group, had a letter in this paper. In the context of a call for the Christian Brothers to be more humane and honest in their dealings with abuse victims, he wrote: "In the many years that we have been dealing with the subject, I have always been conscious of the many decent and holy Christian Brothers who served their lives as their founder wished. I have been saddened too by the few who abused their vocations for their own depraved gratification. Yes, only a few."

On Tuesday Fintan O'Toole wrote about the Christian Brothers that "a revered Irish institution ran rape camps on three continents". Strange, is it not, that a media opinion leader feels able to write in the most damning terms possible about the Brothers, but someone representing victims recognises that it was only the few.

Not that Tom Hayes was letting the Brothers off the hook. He wrote " . . . the hurts and abuses by those few Christian Brothers must be properly compensated for." I could not agree more. Nothing will compensate for a blighted childhood, but there are valuable things which can be done. Money, yes, but also counselling, second-chance education and ongoing support where needed.

In the third States of Fear programme, Dr Eoin O'Sullivan spoke about the closing of Madonna House in Dublin. "The other knock-on effect of Madonna House is that effectively all members of staff are under a cloud of suspicion. But the report makes it clear that the abuses were being perpetrated by a small number of staff members." He goes on to say, " . . . of those (other) centres that have been investigated but not published that all members of staff are under a cloud of suspicion which I think is unjust and unfair to the vast majority of childcare workers who do their best in very difficult circumstances".

This is completely right. But why, if you substitute "religious who worked in industrial schools" for "residential childcare workers" and "industrial schools" for "residential child care" does the same logic no longer hold? What is his difficulty with religious orders which causes the normally sane Fintan O'Toole to compare industrial schools to Bosnian rape camps, a term of abuse to which even the sleaziest tabloid did not descend?

Fintan seems to believe that anyone who advocates anything other than blanket condemnation of religious orders is somehow soft on child abuse and wishes to allow religious orders to evade responsibility. We have to move beyond this kind of simplification. Throughout history, whenever groups of people are portrayed as uniformly evil and as beyond redemption, whether they be Jews or Muslims, abuse victims or members of religious orders, we should stop to ask why this particular group is being targeted. Why are the normal criteria of balance and fairness in journalistic standards being abandoned?

Fintan states as a fact that "specific assets held by the Brothers in Canada have been transferred to an Irish-registered company, Richmond Newstreet, so as to put them beyond reach of claims for compensation by the victims". Fintan should substantiate this assertion or withdraw it.

A figure of $100 million has been bandied about as the value of the Canadian Christian Brothers' assets. Brother Barry Lynch, Provincial of the Canadian province, told me that it came from a 1991 guesstimate of the total value of the properties managed by the Brothers. It ignored the fact that some of the most valuable properties were trusts and some were owned by dioceses.

The sale of the assets directly owned by the Brothers (including everything except a pension fund and their personal property in their bedrooms) realised only $6 million. In a bizarre piece of accounting, the liquidators then alleged that a significant proportion of the discrepancy between the $100 million guesstimate and the $6 million figure had been stashed away. This is despite the fact that, as Lynch told me, "The liquidators have had complete access to the annual financial statements of the Canadian province of Brothers and know that the trust and church properties were not sold . No funds went to Richmond Newstreet."

The Secretary General of the Christian Brothers , Edmund Garvey, stated this week that he would stake his "truth and integrity" on the fact that there was not a single Canadian cent in Richmond Newstreet. Maybe he and Lynch are lying. But Prime Time and Fintan O'Toole have not provided one scintilla of proof that they are.

Call me cynical, but the allegations might not be unconnected with the fact that Arthur Andersen, the court appointed liquidator raised $6,088,219 (Can) from the sale of the Brothers' assets. By December 31st, 1999, Arthur Andersen had paid itself $937,208 and had paid its lawyers $2,564,892. If I had spent $3.5 million of $6 million which was intended to provide compensation to victims, I might want to focus attention elsewhere.

That was in Canada. In Australia, the law firm much quoted by Prime Time complained bitterly about the level of compensation awarded to victims. They are right. The sums awarded are pretty paltry. Strangely, though, they too neglected to mention that of a fund of $5million intended for compensation, they took $1.5 million for their legal fees.

Gratifying as it might be for opinion columnists to snipe at each other, this issue is too important for a clash of egos. There are people who are desperate for healing, adults whose lives were shattered as children, religious who have had to face up to the horror that some of their fellow religious made a grotesque travesty of their vows. There is also the troubling issue of innocent people who have had false allegations made against them by a tiny minority of former residents of industrial schools. They are not representative of the majority of residents, no more than the abusers are representative of all religious. The only way to deal with this frighteningly complex issue is to cling to the truth, whether or not it accords with our cherished prejudices.

That is as true for the Fintan O'Tooles and the Mary Rafterys as it is for "religiously motivated people".

bobrien@irish-times.ie