Ireland deeply shocked by abuse revelations

Locking up children and treating them cruelly was not unknown in other western European countries in the 20th century, but Ireland did it on an industrial scale. The numbers of children incarcerated in Irish institutions — for truancy, begging, running away from home, or simply because they were put there by their parents — was higher than in England, Scotland and Wales combined. The commission was especially critical of the Irish Department of Education for its "deferential" and "submissive" attitude toward the religious orders, especially the Christian Brothers, who received taxpayers’ money to house the country’s most inconvenient children.

It is hard to realize in today’s modern and increasingly secular Ireland just how deferential, submissive and reverential Catholic people were to the clergy. Politicians used to live in fear of criticism by a bishop, commonly referred to as "a belt of the crozier." In a celebrated case in 1950, then-Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid bullied the government into dropping Health Minister Noel Browne’s scheme for free maternity care, on the grounds that it was "socialized medicine."

Such kow-towing to the clergy had diminished somewhat by 1992 when the Catholic Church was hit by the scandal of Eamon Casey, bishop of Galway, who misused diocesan funds to secretly maintain a son in the United States.

Subsequent revelations during the 1990s of sexual abuse of boys by priests, and the cover-up by some bishops, eroded further the authority of the Catholic hierarchy. Now it is on the defensive.

Victims of abuse in Ireland’s industrial schools are not entirely happy, however. None of the abusers are named in the report, and victims’ representatives were shamefully excluded from a press conference in a Dublin hotel on Wednesday to announced the commission’s findings.

John Kelly, coordinator of a group called Survivors of Child Abuse, complained after his exclusion that they had been encouraged to open their wounds, “and they’ve been left gaping open.”

In 2002 an agreement between the government and the religious communities indemnified the orders against all future claims on payment of €128 million ($176 million) in cash and property. The main opposition party’s education spokesman, Brian Hayes of Fine Gael, said this should be reviewed now as the “total liability that we know about currently is about €1.2 billion ($1.65 billion).”

The report by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is by no means the end of the matter. Another official inquiry, into the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese, is to be published in the coming weeks. Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has warned that it will reveal that between 1940 and 2008, allegations were made against 77 priests of the archdiocese, that 400 people have been identified who suffered sexual abuse from priests, and that settlement of claims in civil actions in the Irish capital alone is running at over €12 million ($16.5 million).

The report, Martin warned in an Easter week homily, “will shock us all … and will make the entire church in Dublin a humbler church.” After reading about the conduct of brothers and nuns in industrial schools, Archbishop Martin called the stories of abuse “stomach turning.”

There is much speculation that Martin, a Vatican careerist, was sent to Ireland from Rome in 2003 to clean up the mess in Ireland over sexual abuse and restore the clergy's good name, and that he will return to the Vatican after all the Irish Catholic Church’s dirty linen has finally been washed in public.

More on Ireland and the church:

The ground truth from Belfast

The disappearing philanthropists

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