Ciarán Cuffe (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)

The content of the Ryan report chills me to the core. It challenges our beliefs and our views of history. It forces us to rethink our relationship with the church and our relationship with the State. It should make us humble and it remind us of our awesome responsibility to discharge duties to the children of the State.

On reading through aspects of the report, almost every second line makes the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up. Few things in politics chill one to the core but this report does. I refer to the experience of those who reported sexual abuse in institutions and the way in which these people were treated. The fact that those who had that awesome responsibility towards children treated those children who disclosed sexual abuse with disbelief and further abuse is one of the most chilling revelations in the report. Female witnesses describe at times being told they were responsible for the sexual abuse they experienced and this could only have caused greater psychological scars on the abused.

A second aspect of the report I found disturbing was the way in which the Christian Brothers in particular talked about retiring from the world and that there was a strong ideological wish to retire from the world and not to maintain any intercourse with externs without permission from their immediate superior. Brothers were not allowed to read newspapers, listen to the radio, visit friends or attend outside functions or sporting events without express permission. Walks had to be taken in the company of at least one other brother. This social seclusion and wish to push the world away must have been one of the most dangerous aspects of what went on in those institutions.

It is interesting to note that correspondence from lay people, particularly containing complaint or criticism, was treated with suspicion and hostility, thus perpetuating the problems within those institutions. Another aspect of the Christian Brothers' treatment was the attitude of the brothers towards women. The report shows that conversation with mothers or female friends of the children was to be kept to the minimum. One consequence of this was that the Christian Brothers' institutions became all-male worlds and this is a very dangerous place to retreat into. Numerous witnesses gave evidence to the investigation commission about the problems caused by the lack of female involvement in the day-to-day operation of the schools. The lack of this interaction with females was central and at the heart of the problem.

This should make us think again about our current education system where a significant section of secondary education is still segregated by sex. We should thing again about same-sex schools and I believe we should push more strongly for the integration of male and female, of boys and girls in schools as there are many positive benefits.

Another aspect of the report was the reference to modesty and silence within the institutions. The subdued tone within these institutions is an aspect of the institutional life that comes up repeatedly in books and films about that time. Whatever the effects are of silence among adults, I can only imagine that children must have emerged from these institutions deeply traumatised by the push towards maintaining silence at many times during the day. There was silence during meal times into the 1950s and many recall there was a general rule of silence when moving through the buildings, in the dormitories and at night. The natural tendency of children is to communicate, to talk and chatter, to laugh and cry. To have that denied within an institution must have traumatised brutally the most vulnerable in society.

From meeting those who have been abused, whether on the streets or at the door, or, most recently, meeting people who simply come up to talk about their experiences, in my 18 years in public life I have never met people so traumatised as those who suffered abuse in institutions. I remember such meetings as long ago as the early 1990s, and within the past two weeks a man came up to me outside the Blackrock Shopping Centre. The lives of these people have been destroyed by the treatment they received through the neglect of the State and the effects of the religious institutions. That can only be a call for all of us to effect significant change and ensure that we provide the best possible protection to the vulnerable in society. That silence was intimidating and left those people in great danger.

Looking on and reflecting on institutions of the present day in Ireland, some of the largest of these are hospitals, both regular and psychiatric. We must think very carefully about the record-keeping within these institutions. We should think very carefully about how we treat the vulnerable today and whether what is talked and written about in these reports is something of the past. We should look again at the systems we have in place to address the needs of the most vulnerable in society. I am not convinced, particularly regarding the treatment of those who suffer from psychiatric illness, that we are doing enough to deal with the strong needs of those individuals.

This is a call for action. The recommendations are spelt out in detail and I believe there can be no excuse for inaction on moving swiftly to deal with what is in the report. Society can only benefit from all of that.

What I found disturbing in the report was the role of legal teams which acted on behalf of orders and institutions in denying aspects of earlier reports and there is a question there for the legal profession. It must reflect on the considerable amount of work that legal teams did to try to refute what was patently obvious, namely, that the State and the religious orders had failed deeply the most vulnerable in society. When one looks at the response of the Christian Brothers to the Mazars' report, there seems to be a very great weight of legal action to defuse, refute and destroy the facts that were staring us in the face.

I welcome the motion and trust that we will move quickly to take action on the recommendations.

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