Evading the unpalatable truth about sexual abuse

For some people, denial is just a river in Egypt. For others it is part of the discredited jargon of psychoanalysis. But it is in fact a natural impulse for societies as well as for individuals. Faced with the most painful visions of what our society is capable of, many prefer to turn away, to shoot the messengers or to evade the consequences of the unpalatable truth.

This happened with much of Southern society during the years of the Northern conflict. And it has been happening with the terrible story of the industrial school system that was revealed in the television series States of Fear and Mary Raftery's and Eoin O'Sullivan's book, Suffer the Little Children.

In the immediate aftermath of the TV series, there was a broad determination to confront this issue finally for the sake of the survivors and of the children who are now and will in future be in the care of the State. But that determination has been whittled away to the extent that survivors found themselves having to picket the Dail this week. There has been a subtle backlash, made up of an open campaign of denial on the one hand, and a disgracefully minimal piece of legislation on the other.

On Today With Pat Kenny, in the Sunday Business Post and in the letters page of The Irish Times, Breda O'Brien, a sincere and committed journalist, has made extravagant claims about her own alleged ability to uncover flawed research in Suffer the Little Children.

Earlier this week, in a letter to The Irish Times, Maria Byrne treated these claims as if they were now an established fact, showing how quickly wild hyperbole can be transmuted in public discourse into accepted reality. Ms Byrne wrote that Breda O'Brien had come up with "damning evidence" of "distressing errors and omissions" in Suffer the Little Children.

Breda O'Brien is clearly distressed by the evidence that is emerging from the survivors of abuse and, like many of us, she would prefer to think that it did not happen. On Today With Pat Kenny on November 23rd, she strongly implied that many of the survivors may, in fact, be misremembering their experiences or imagining things that did not happen at all. To her credit, she later apologised to the survivors for this unfortunate implication.

But the fact that she said these things in the first place gives some indication of how deep runs the desire to believe that the horrors are just some kind of awful nightmare that will go away when we all wake up. It is in that mood that she has purported to show the flaws in the research for Suffer the Little Children. What her attack comes down to is, in fact, just two issues.

One concerns the death of a boy in the Artane industrial school in the 1950s. The book cites eyewitnesses who suggest that this death was the result of deliberate violence. Ms O'Brien flourishes the contemporary coroner's report which finds that the death was accidental. But this, in fact, tells us nothing except that the evidence before the coroner - which came, of course, from the Christian Brothers - was to that effect.

A coroner's report is not a criminal investigation. To cite eyewitness evidence that was not available to the coroner is to raise entirely legitimate questions that may eventually be answered by the current criminal investigation into events at Artane.

THE other concerns the rightly respected nun Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, and whether or not she (a) knew about sexual abuse in an industrial school in Kilkenny and (b) at a conference in Killarney in 1971 strongly criticised Department of Education officials over the Kennedy Report which led to the ending of the industrial school system.

On the first issue, the book and television programmes relied on Sister Stan's own statement to the Garda to the effect that she "picked up on it" that the man who was physically abusing the students "might have been sexually abusing them as well". This is not "flawed research" but very fine investigative reporting.

The second issue, concerning Sister Stan's alleged criticism of the Department of Education, is one in which I have some stake, since a piece I wrote here is cited in relation to it in Suffer the Little Children. According to Maria Byrne, this "damaging tale . . . has been shown by Breda O'Brien to be completely bogus". In fact, Breda O'Brien has shown no such thing.

She has, she claims, spoken to sources who deny it. I have spoken to sources who confirm it, and so have the authors of the book. At most, what this amounts to is nothing more than another example of a truth familiar to any tribunal-watchers: that people sometimes have different memories of distant events.

These charges are so minor in the overall picture of systematic abuse over 50 years that they might best be ignored. Except that they help to create the atmosphere in which the Government could produce the quite scandalous Statute of Limitations Bill that is now before the Dail.

The Bill is supposed to open the way to justice for the victims. Instead, it puts up new barriers. Victims are supposed to prove that they were not "mentally aware" of the abuse within the normal time limits for prosecutions. And those limits are to be lifted only for sexual, rather than purely physical abuse, a distinction that in effect denies the trauma of those who suffered what amounts to torture.

One of the ironies in this situation is that, while the Government is dodging the issue and some writers have been going out to bat for the religious orders, members of the clergy have been rather more forthright in demanding that the history of abuse be fully faced by their Church. In The Irish Times in recent weeks, Father Patrick McClafferty wrote: "It is a need crying out to heaven that these matters be energetically, sincerely and wholeheartedly confronted by the entire Church."

Father Jackie Robinson has written that "the impression seems to be out there, rightly or wrongly, that both the Catholic Church and the State authorities are backsliding on previous commitments. Why, for example, are the Church authorities refusing to open their archives? . . . Why are solicitors and barristers calling the shots when it comes to reconciliation and compensation between the Catholic Church and the victims?" When members of the clergy have the courage to confront these issues, isn't it time that the Government did likewise?

Fintan O'Toole can be contacted at fotoole@irish-times.ie