Fergus Finlay on child abuse

According to informed sources the report on the Dublin archdiocese, due out later this month, will carry horrific revelations.

Nothing can be done to change the past but we can learn from it. Is the institutional hierarchical Catholic church in Ireland at present capable of learning from the past?

As long as clericalism exists it seems the chance of any real learning is slim. And clericalism lives in Ireland, indeed, it seems to be getting a new lease of life.


The article below appears in today's Irish Examiner.

Child abuse: get set for new round of shock, horror and hypocrisy
By Fergus Finlay

OVER the next week or so, we will see another couple of reports that will confirm, once again, how children really don’t matter in Ireland.

And once again we will be shocked by the evidence and hurt by the pain and suffering contained in those reports. We will make all sorts of resolutions that we’re going to do better in future, that we’ll never let this happen again. And then the reports will go away to gather dust. The media outrage will die down. Other news stories will come along and we will have to wait till another tragedy happens, or another scandal is revealed, before we go through the whole hypocritical charade once again.

Despite the things that all these reports say about us, the neglect and abuse of children is not an issue in the elections taking place now. None of the parties seems to think it worthwhile to put real child protection on their agendas. Tomorrow, the Commission to Enquire into Child Abuse will publish its report. Or perhaps I should say reports. Five volumes will be published, covering the work of an investigation committee and a confidential committee. The two committees took testimony from, I believe, more than 1,000 people during the lifetime of the commission. Most of the witnesses before the commission were people who were sentenced as children to live out their childhoods in residential institutions.

The vast majority of the children involved were guilty of no crime or, in some cases, petty crime. The places to which they were sent were run on behalf of the state by a variety of religious orders. Thanks to the work of journalists like Mary Raftery, we know a lot about the abuse these children suffered. Our state has apologised to the children, all of them now adults, and some effort has been made to compensate them.

A deal has been done with the religious orders to limit the financial burden they will have to carry arising from this compensation. One of the things we might wonder about tomorrow, as we start to read and hear about the terrible things that were done to children, is whether that deal was just and fair. But I hope the thing we think about most will be the fact that all the abuse in those five volumes, all the suffering of children that will be revealed, was done in our name. And it could happen again.

Later in the month, or perhaps early next month, the report of the inquiry into abuse in the Dublin diocese will be published. It will talk about the hundreds – yes, hundreds – of children and young people who were abused by priests of the diocese over the years. And it will talk about the cover-ups, the hiding of evidence, the way in which the diocese protected its priests and added to the suffering and abuse of victims by doing so.

And it too will be deeply shocking. We will once again feel betrayed, comforted a little perhaps by the thought that there is a good, strong bishop there now, and nothing like this will happen ever again on his watch. Will we stop to wonder what will happen when he leaves? Will the needs of the institution once again take priority over the rights of children? These two reports – shocking as no doubt they will be – are only the latest.

In the past six months we’ve had two reports from an Oireachtas committee. One dealt with the need for proper and full vetting of people who work with children, and one dealt with the issue of how the criminal justice system should deal with people who have sex with children. We’ve had the report into the activities of the Cloyne diocese, which demonstrated that elements of the church hierarchy weren’t honouring even their own guidelines. We’ve had the Monageer report which showed all too graphically (despite extensive censorship) how the lack of priority afforded to child protection in Ireland has led to chaos in a critically important system. An inquiry is still going on into extremely serious child protection issues in Roscommon.

That’s just the past six months. Before that we had the Kilkenny incest inquiry, the Ferns report, Kelly Fitzgerald, Sophia McColgan. The list goes on and on, for years and years and years. And nothing ever changes. Public attitudes change, of course, but the entire political system seems totally unable or willing even to contemplate anything substantial. Look at the reaction to the Monageer report, with ministers all announcing that the inquiry had found that no matter what system had been in place, the tragedy wouldn’t have been prevented. Ministers couldn’t say that without relying on a very heavily qualified and censored couple of paragraphs in the report, but they seemed prepared to cling to anything that would justify as little action as possible. Why is that? Everyone who works in this area knows there are thousands of children at risk all the time.

Last week it was reported that around 6,500 children were known to the system to be at risk of neglect or abuse and none of them had been allocated to a social worker. And yet the minister for health could assure RTÉ News there is no problem because social workers are not subject to the embargo. But that is the direct opposite of the experience on the ground where social workers are carrying caseloads that are far bigger than their counterparts anywhere in Europe. The truth is that the money is wrong, the staffing is wrong, the communications are wrong, the structures are wrong. The hugely overburdened HSE simply cannot cope with the task of taking responsibility for vulnerable children any more – it’s fighting too many fires, dealing with too many crises.

THERE is overwhelming evidence that the system isn’t coping and that children are at risk on that account. And children will die – maybe they already have. Children will be beaten and tortured, and maybe that has happened, too. Children will go hungry, they’ll be out too late at night, they will end up homeless and adrift. They will be introduced to drugs and street crime. We’ll wring our hands and perhaps we’ll hang our heads in shame. But we will once again stop short of doing the things that must be done really to protect children. We all know what they are – we need changes in law, in structures, in management. We need a fully fleshed out policy on child protection and it needs to be given the force of law. And there needs to be someone responsible for implementing child protection policy in the state – someone who will run the system on a day-to-day basis, someone responsible for standards and practice and communications.

As they say, it’s not rocket science. But why is it so unimportant? When we’ve all finished reading the reports due out in the next couple of weeks, will we march on the Dáil to demand change? Or will we all sit around and hope that’s all in the past now. Is it easier for us all to kid ourselves? Or is it really that children don’t matter?

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Tuesday, May 19, 2009