Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

I regret the inadequacy of the words that I will use to deal with the Ryan commission report. I cannot speak with the conviction, truth of recollection or vividness of the nightmare through which so many young children went to grow into adulthood. Nor can I speak with the power of the emotion to which I listened yesterday and in recent weeks. All I can do is speak as a citizen, the leader of my party and the father of a young family and try to imagine what those young boys and girls went through in the torture of their minds, given the extent of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Ireland cries silently with those survivors.

The report shames us as a State and as a society. The Legislature must deal with the consequences of the horrors of the past and set down what we can to deal with the future. I thank the Chief Whip for accepting a number of amendments to the motion, as they will add to the strength of the Government's hand when dealing with the religious institutions and congregations. This is a difficult time for people who stood on the street outside Leinster House yesterday and who have lived with torture in their minds since childhood. It is also a difficult time for the many men and women who have carried out and are carrying out their religious vocations in a proper and fitting manner. They must put up with the situation while following their vocations as expected.

Through the decades, the mantra was that children should be cherished equally. As we now know, the State was ignoring the neglect and abuse of the most vulnerable of our children. This was not cherishing them or Christian compassion. It was a failure to care. We stand complicit in the criminalisation of little children as a consequence of their poverty, but that is just the beginning. The State was responsible for the destruction of life. It was responsible for the destruction of that most precious formative gift, namely, childhood.

As a country, we are haunted by the Great Famine. We wonder at the inhumanity shown to the starving a century and a half ago. We should all be haunted by what Mr. Justice Ryan has disclosed, that is, a great famine of compassion, a plague of deliberate, relentless cruelty. We stand shamed and we should not excuse ourselves from it. Edmund Burke stated that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to stay silent. Generation after generation of good people knew enough about these institutions to raise questions, make themselves unpopular and rescue children, but our society stayed silent. Therein lies a crucial lesson. None of us can ever outsource human concern or compassion. None of us can ever ignore evidence of societal failure. None of us should ever hand over our responsibility for the unprotected to an agency or congregation and wash our hands of it.

This applies to politicians in particular. Every side of the House should remember that we are the voice of the voiceless and the defenders of the defenceless. We must relentlessly question. We must have and demonstrate a passion for justice and a bottomless well of anger against injustice. Above all, as the Taoiseach pointed out, we must listen. It should not have taken television producers and a State inquiry to give the victims of institutional abuse permission to tell their stories, to come forward and to be heard. Each and every story told and heard only now, decades after the horrors, fills us with shame. The pictures, emotions and reality are vivid in all of their memories. They have lived with them everyday and every night through the years.

In one incident, one Brother Percival ordered a little boy wearing callipers on his legs out of his class for talking. The little boy tried to obey the brother's orders, but was beaten in the face as he stumbled to his feet. When he fell, did the man committed to a religious life repent his actions and help? No. Instead, we have been told that the brother jumped on the boy "like he was a bag of potatoes". Yesterday, I spoke with a man outside Leinster House who stole an apple on Moore Street when he was nine years of age. He was sent to Upton and was beaten and raped repeatedly for six years. We should talk to him and try to understand from where he is coming. Such stories are repeated endlessly in the Ryan report.

However, it was not all violence. Sometimes, it was psychological. A little boy in Letterfrack had his head shaved and was sent to Coventry for a period that was to end when his hair grew back. The child was isolated from his friends and companions, the only human contacts he could trust. This situation lasted until his hair grew back. The simplicity of his account of waiting to be let back into the human race is heartbreaking. He stated: "I do not know how long it was, but it felt like an awful long time." I am sure that it did. As one who taught and is a parent, I know, as do most Deputies, that children have an unformed notion of time. Any postponement is painful. Tomorrow seems forever away. The brother who shaved the child's head and isolated him until the hair was long enough to "justify" returning to his group had a sophisticated understanding of how to deprive, damage, diminish and degrade.

Another witness told the story of a brother who, believing he was being laughed at, threw a child around the classroom. The child hit the desks and the floor. He remembers that the commotion of boys screaming brought another brother into the room. That brother pulled the violent man off the boy who, at that point, was unconscious from the beating he had received. To this day, that abused child, now grown into a man, believes that he would have died at the hands of the religious had the second man not intervened. These are the grown man's words:

I know to God that if it had not been for him coming in, I do not think I would be here today, in all honesty. When you seen this man when he lost his temper he was like a wolf. His jaws literally went out and he bared his teeth and he just lashed at me. I was running trying to get away from him. He hit me, it did not matter where, legs, back, head, anywhere. During that I must have passed out because when I came around there was water running on my head and I thought I was drowning. I drew back and I cracked my head on the nozzle of the tap so I had blood coming down, I had tears, I was soaking wet. He was not finished then. He threw me on the ground and he said "you will walk that floor for the rest of the night". The watchman did not come that night. Nobody came and I walked that passage until 6.30 in the morning. I was so terrified of going to bed that he might come back and beat me again. I walked the whole night, I swear to God.

Any of us looking at our own children can only imagine the turmoil, trauma and terror suffered in that child's head. Just imagine it.

Some of us, growing up, read Charles Kingsley's accounts of what the Victorians did to the poorest of their children. Some of us read the Brontës' accounts of what the powers that be did to orphans. We were horrified. It gave people bad dreams, but it was fiction. It had not really happened and certainly not in Ireland. Now we know different.

Now we know, courtesy of the Ryan report, that within living memory and within our own country, we visited comparable horrors on our children. Let us not hide behind euphemisms. This was not just a failure to protect. This was torture, pure and simple. That is why justice must be done and must be seen to be done. The State and the religious congregations must make atonement for the crimes they committed and the 2002 deal, as we now know, goes nowhere near that.

This is about money in part, but it not all about money. We became a black spot for decades of institutional and State child abuse. We now must become a leader in reconciliation and reparation. We must get the best expert advice to help adult victims of child abuse to achieve wholeness. We must set up a body, independent of church and Government, and trust it will work with and support organisations and individuals to develop the best response to this tragedy.

The victims have to be central to all of that. They were on the street yesterday. Their lives have been impacted by all of this. We have to try to get this right. There is no solution to happily end the horrors of the past. That is clear, but it does not absolve us. We must demand a response that draws together all the generosity, sensitivity and compassion that should have been shown to survivors when they were children.

We must move to abolish the culture of secrecy and denial still to be found in some aspects of child care services. That culture means that some reports on child welfare issues have to be published and implemented in full. That is why I say we will be judged by our actions. We must ensure those who should be before the courts are brought before them and the law of the land is applied.

We must implement in full the recommendations of the Ryan report. We must implement in full the recommendations of the national review of the compliance with children first, the national guidelines for the protection and welfare of children. We must implement the published recommendations of the Monageer report, the report of the joint committee on child protection and the first interim report of the joint committee on the constitutional amendment on children. Others will deal in greater detail with these requirements.

The corpus of legislation passed during any Dáil term is an aspect of national record-keeping. It is part of the first draft of history. However, the stories told in passion and pain by individuals are, ultimately, what matters. The media is frequently criticised by politicians on all sides, but in this instance we must give credit where credit is due, because the media, along with the survivors, brought about the pivotal role in allowing survivors' stories to be told and heard. Television, print, radio and the media in general did the State and the survivors a real service.

We cannot re-write those stories, nor can we write a happy ending to them. However, it is our clear and inescapable duty to reach out, to rescue, to listen, to learn and to create something out of this catalogue of cruelty in which, we, as a nation, we can take some pride. Ireland cries silently with these victims. I hope their tears will free the machinery of Government to set in place what needs to be done to deal with the horror stories of the past and set in place foundations that will ensure this never happens again to the children of the future.

I wish to share the rest of my time with Deputy Brian Hayes.

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