Madam, – Patsy McGarry’s excellent article (“State must confront Magdalene tragedy”, Opinion, June 7th) makes grim reading.
Mr McGarry highlights the cruelty and religious perversion of a so-called Christian country which was dominated by the Catholic Church.
Innocent victims were effectively “tortured and enslaved” because of their social circumstances by people who were so-called “representatives of Christ”.
A United Nations committee has indicated that those people who are still alive should be investigated in terms of the depraved and most certainly unchristian behaviour that they imposed and inflicted upon many innocent victims who had the grave misfortune of being “incarcerated” in these “hell-holes”, all in the name of the Irish Catholic Church.
I am a practising Christian who has no animosity towards the Irish Catholic Church – in fact I participate in the liturgy of my local Catholic parish in Dublin on a regular basis, but I feel that as a matter of natural justice a full and final investigation should be carried out, not by the Irish Catholic Church, but by an independent group of suitably qualified lay people, who can identify and bring to account before our criminal courts all perpetrators of “torture” and ill-treatment against those who were, in the main, unfortunate victims of an uncaring and repressive society.
Those who have suffered should find some solace and perhaps closure to their pain and suffering when the State finally convicts those who caused grave injustice against so many. The State has adopted a “cowardly” position by failing those who have suffered at the hands of malevolent and perverted individuals who definitely did not behave as Christ would have done.
Is it any wonder that the Irish Catholic Church continues to decline in relevance unless and until it as an institution and the State adequately acknowledge their responsibility to those who have suffered? – Yours, etc,