Dáil debates

Thursday, 11 June 2009

Ryan Report on the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse: Motion (Resumed)

 

6:00 pm

Photo of Bernard DurkanBernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

It is said that stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage; the meaning being that the free spirit is never captured. However, reading these reports it is clear that is not the case. Children, adults, and people of all ages with special needs in this country were kept in institutional cages in the dark and were punished repeatedly and abused to an appalling extent. It is horrifying. It is even upsetting to read or to listen to accounts of what took place.

Can one imagine what it was like, if one had been the age of some of the children involved? They could see themselves as having done nothing wrong but, for one reason or another, they were institutionalised in a place in which they had no friends but very many enemies. Can one imagine what it was like for them to wait on a nightly basis for the predators and then to see some of those predators parade themselves afterwards in an exalted fashion, receiving recognition for what they appeared to embody? Can we imagine now what it was like for those children and young adults, having to go through that and then try to reconcile themselves with society and with life afterwards? It was appalling.

As a former member of the Eastern Health Board who was accustomed to making visits, as were other Members of this House, I am amazed that visiting committees and groups were not able to detect anything of what was going on, even without confirmation or corroborative evidence. It had to be visible and possible to detect. Of course, the old games did and do prevail. Hide everything at the moment of inspection. As Deputy Ulick Burke well knows, astute inspectors should be able to see past all that. All the tricks have been tried before. One thing is certain. Unless justice is done in a meaningful way, this kind of thing will continue. It will probably go on anyway but we must try to do something to bring it to a halt.

This is not purely an Irish phenomenon but, unfortunately, exists across Europe. This sadistic, appalling, sick, cynical and constant abuse of those who are under the power of those in authority continues - in our next-door neighbour jurisdiction, the UK, in more recent times and throughout Europe, in Austria, Belgium and various other countries. In our instance it spread across the country in a network. It appears it was accepted and acknowledged that this was the right way to treat people in care. It was a kind of Darwinism on the rampage.

What must happen now is that justice must be done and be seen to be done. It does not matter where the people are who committed these atrocities, they must be judged by our justice system on what they have done and must pay the price. We cannot hide from the fact that as long as these atrocities have been committed and the people who committed them are still around - many are although some have passed on - justice must be done. Otherwise, we will be seen to have failed in our job. Once it becomes known that a particular situation prevails and once we know about it, but do nothing about it, we are culpable. It is as simple as that. Our entire system becomes corrupted by what follows denial of that nature.

There was a massive failure of our system in the past. Just the other day, I spoke to an elderly man who intervened in the case of a child in one of our industrial schools in the late 1940s or early 1950s when the child was being beaten mercilessly by a member of staff. This elderly man was a young man at the time and intervened, but for his trouble and pain he was prosecuted, fined and bound to the peace. That is how society dealt with the issue then. Unless we do something about the situation now and fine, prosecute and punish those who carried out abuse, we will have failed also. There is no use in condemning the system of the past unless we do something now to bring it to a halt.

Vulnerable people always seem to become victims, whether they are poor, young or old. When people entrusted with their care fail in that duty of care, those vulnerable people always seem to be abused. Whenever they attempt to stand up for their rights or raise their hands, nobody wants to believe them. The reason for this is it is more convenient to ignore them. Sadly, we do not seem to have learned from the awful mistakes of the past. The reports go back over years and decades, but the same thing is happening today. Children are being abused at this moment. There has been institutional failure in the cases of children who were being abused in the past three to seven years. I have raised this issue repeatedly with various Departments, but the first response is always a brush-off. Nobody wants to know or respond because it might upset some of the institutions and might be difficult to prove.

The issue of proof and the lack of or need for it is important. There have been situations where children have been taken away from their natural parents and been institutionalised on the basis of false information and have become victims thereafter. It is important that every case be investigated, but every effort must be made to ensure that proof is obtained and that justice follows.

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