Beverley Flynn (Mayo, Fianna Fail)

Like other Members of the House I welcome the opportunity to speak on this report, which makes extremely painful reading for every decent man, woman and child in this country because it exposes very uncomfortable facts on an underside to life in Ireland. On my way into the House today I met with Michael O'Brien who was on "Questions and Answers" recently and some other men who were also victims of abuse in institutions in this country. Listening to their stories and reading the stories of others makes for uncomfortable and unbearable reading by any individual in this country. As a mother of young children, I believe the contents of this report to be shameful for Irish society.

I welcome the report which is a vindication of the thousands of young children, now adults, abused, ill-treated and left marked for life. Worse than this, they had nobody to whom they could tell their stories. There was nobody to listen to them. While the report is about the abuse perpetrated by the religious orders, men and women who betrayed shamelessly their vows, we must also remember that these awful things did not happen in isolation or without the knowledge of others. In rural local communities, Letterfrack, Daingean, Artane or Kilkenny local people, including doctors, the Garda, tradesmen, shopkeepers, teachers, social workers and local clergy knew what was going on. All had to know and all kept their silence.

To understand how this situation was allowed to develop we must look at the relationship between the State and the church in this country as represented by the religious institutions. That situation arose because of a policy of placing our basic educational and health services, funded by the taxpayer, under the sole control of the church. The Ryan report refers to this situation of control. It was a control which came to be unquestioned, which led to blatant abuse of power and allowed the religious institutions to behave as if they were above the law, unaccountable to anybody and, to this day, unaccountable.

In turn, the institutions were able to resist and oppose the idea of a child-centred education. Rather, children were considered intrinsically sinful; they had to be disciplined. It was an accepted belief in ordinary Catholic schools that children had to be punished. However, this reached its extremes in the institutions where defenceless children had nobody to speak for them and nobody to protect them. The end result was that the protectors became the persecutors. Sadism replaced sympathy and kindness and fear and exploitation became the norm. All of the tyranny was carried out with impunity. The perpetrators were responsible to nobody; they were untouchable.

What comes across again and again in the Ryan report is the repeated refusal of the congregations to accept collective responsibility. Even when forced to acknowledge the catalogue of wrongdoing in one institution after another, they flatly refused to make an admission. One of the main criticisms of the Ryan report is that even in recent times this continued to be the case.

The Ryan report tells us - we need to know no more than this - that the safety of children was never a priority and that "there was serious indifference to the safety of children". All of this neglect and abuse was carried out with the passive collusion of the State. Let that not be forgotten. The Ryan report states that the failure of the Department of Education to control the excesses in these institutions was an acknowledgement by the State of the ascendancy of the congregations and their ownership of the system. The deference shown by the State to the congregations was the green light for them to do as they wished without fear or stricture.

The Department knew about and ignored breaches of the code of corporal punishment. It investigated allegations of sexual abuse, confirmed them and dismissed the abusers without ever reporting the matter to the Garda. Complaints by parents to the Department of Education were ignored. Young girls were sexually abused by foster parents, holiday families, employers and visitors, and were powerless to find a listening ear.

It goes without saying that the recommendations of the Ryan report must be implemented now in full and without qualification. No child in the care of the State can ever again be put at risk, as were those who marched on the streets of Dublin yesterday. I joined that march yesterday not as a politician, but as a concerned citizen to show some solidarity with the people who suffered terribly at the hands of this State. The large number of people who turned up in support illustrated the outcry from the people of this country at this shameful experience, which is deeply regrettable. We must ensure that it never happens again.

I take this opportunity to welcome two points made by the Taoiseach this morning. He stated that he told the representatives that the needs of the survivors of abuse is the Government's number one priority at this time and that we are committed to addressing those needs and other issues that arise from the report in consultation with the representatives of the survivors. I welcome the Taoiseach's commitment that this matter will be treated as an absolute priority. Also, and this is critical, those who perpetrated crimes against survivors, regardless of how long ago or how old they are, must be made amenable to the law so that they can be held to account for their crimes. There are victims in this country aged 80 and 90 years who are still suffering the consequences of that abuse. I do not care how old the people in congregations who are guilty of this criminality are, every effort must be made to bring them to justice. We owe that to the victims and to the people of this country. What kind of society would we be if we protected these people? There is no place for them here. Every effort must be made to bring them to justice.

Most important, this file cannot be closed until the guilty are brought to trial and face the full rigours of the law for their misdeeds. Those identified in the Ryan report are not deserving of the cloak of anonymity. Having met some of the victims, it remains the case today that many of them have not had an opportunity to tell their story. They have been denied an opportunity to do so. It is a critical part of their healing that they be given an opportunity to tell their stories. I have also heard of people who, when they went before the redress board, were confronted by six barristers. I was told that in one particular case, blame was apportioned to a victim's father. It was said that the father had some role in the abuse the victim had endured in one of these institutions. That man never got an opportunity to contradict that allegation because he was not allowed to speak. We hear of claims averaging in the region of €64,000 per victim. I was told today of one man who, after 20 years and having suffered abuse in an institution, received €56,000. The people who carried out these criminal acts must be brought to justice. We owe that to the survivors, and even more important to those who did not survive but who lived and died without identity and were buried in unmarked graves and to those who endured adult years of torment and grief not because of what they did, but because of what was done to them.

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