Sir - I was pleased to hear the Minister for Education, Mr Micheal Martin, state recently on RTE television that he intends to open the shutters on all State-run industrial schools and institutions. Now that he has taken this decision, it is to be hoped that he will move further and prise open the closets on the scandal of corporal punishment in our national and secondary schools - punishment that was successively approved by former Ministers for Education.
If the Irish Christian Brothers as an institution are being accused and being held accountable for the appalling behaviour of some of their members (and I make no excuses), then the lay teachers in their schools and non-religious schools, many of whom were represented by the Irish National Teachers Organisation and the Association of Secondary School Teachers in Ireland, should also be held accountable for the physical abuse they perpetrated against children, in some cases in the most sadistic and cruel fashion. If we are to be open and transparent, as is now desired, driven to this openness by facile comment by reporters and commentators, some of whom contribute to your newspaper, then in justice and fairness all the scandals of the past should be thoroughly investigated and appropriate sanctions instituted against those who are found guilty.
If it is right and proper to malign thousands of religious in Ireland who in the past have given of their generosity and commitment to the Irish people in hospitals, schools and social services, when the State was unwilling to do so, then equally it is proper and right to seek out those in the wider community who abused their authority and trust in the same period.
In the current climate, it seems to me that the Catholic Church, and in particular the Christian Brothers, are being scape-goated for the wrongs that society tolerated, hid and accepted. If we were to accept the popular argument that censorship prevailed in those times, the censorship of John Charles McQuaid and the Hierarchy, then we are casting Irish society in that period as moronic.
Justice and equity demands that this Government and the teaching unions acknowledge their involvement and collusion in the failures and scandals of the past. Yours, etc. Ciaran Coleman,
Church Road, Dalkey, Co. Dublin.