Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)

Having attended yesterday's march outside the Dáil, listened very carefully to the speeches and witnessed at first hand the deep concerns, emotions, hurt, anger, wrongs and, as the Minister, Deputy Micheál Martin, said, the need for healing, which was so strong there yesterday, we are all at one as Members of the Oireachtas in seeking to resolve this issue and get justice for the people who have been so grievously wronged. The State must ensure that this can never happen again. The most important point is that the appalling lessons that have been learned must never be allowed to be forgotten.

I come from a family where three of my uncles were Christian Brothers. All of them entered the Christian Brothers at the age of 14 to 15. A car came to Kerry and off they went to Dublin to the novitiate. They taught all their lives as Christian Brothers and I always believed they were very fine people - which they are. However, the way the order dealt with the training of such young people led to calamity and the awful, evil lives led by many of the Christian Brothers and other religious. Taking young people into monasteries at such a young age meant they never had any proper social development. They never had normal friendships with members of the opposite sex and they never had proper emotional or sexual development. This led, in my view, to the deep and appalling frustration and evil that grew in many of those in the orders, who destroyed forever the good name of all those fine people who worked in the religious institutions and orders and gave their lives for their beliefs.

The findings of the commission into child abuse are appalling. It describes sexual abuse as "endemic" and that beatings were "pervasive, severe, arbitrary and unpredictable". The institutions were a holdover from Dickensian times.

In Ireland, the schools' inhuman conditions seem to have been something of an open secret. In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt recalls with horror the prospect of being sent to the Christian Brothers' school at Glin, whose staff was well known for "starving and beating" their charges. Such stories must have been just as well known in the halls of the Government. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, numerous observers remarked on the neglect and abuse suffered by students. I have been reading the account on http://www.paddydoyle.com/a-history-of-neglect/ . I wish to put on the record of the House some information from that website:

1944 - P. Ó Muircheartaigh, the Inspector of Industrial and Reformatory Schools reported that "the children are not properly fed," which was "a serious indictment of the system of industrial schools run by nuns - a state of affairs that shouldn't be tolerated in a Christian community", where there was "semi-starvation and lack of proper care and attention." The Resident Managers of Lenaboy and Cappoquin industrial schools, both Sisters of Mercy, were dismissed for negligence and misappropriating funds, despite Church resistance. However, there were no other changes to industrial schools.

1945 - Secretary to the Department of Education wrote to the Secretary of the Dept. of Finance to denounce the "grave situation which has arisen regarding the feeding and clothing of children in industrial schools" due to "parsimony and criminal negligence".

1946 - Community pressure in Limerick, led by Councillor Martin McGuire, on the Dept. of Ed forces the release of Gerard Fogarty, 14, from Glin Industrial School after he was flogged naked with a cat of nine tails and immersed in salt water for trying to escape to his mother. A call for public inquiry into industrial schools was rejected by Minister of Education. Thomas Derrig because "it would serve no useful purpose".

Other voices were raised too. From the international stage came a famous Irish priest, Father Flanagan who visited Ireland in 1946. I will quote what he said and the response he received:

He was dismayed at the state of Ireland's reform schools and blasted them as "a scandal, un-Christlike, and wrong." And he said the Christian Brothers, founded by Edmund Rice, had lost its way.

Speaking to a large audience at a public lecture in Cork's Savoy Cinema he said, "You are the people who permit your children and the children of your communities to go into these institutions of punishment. You can do something about it." He called Ireland's penal institutions "a disgrace to the nation," and later said "I do not believe that a child can be reformed by lock and key and bars, or that fear can ever develop a child's character."

However, his words fell on stony ground. He wasn't simply ignored. He was taken to pieces by the Irish establishment. The then Minister Justice Gerald Boland said in the Dáil that he was "not disposed to take any notice of what Monsignor Flanagan said while he was in this country, because his statements were so exaggerated that I did not think people would attach any importance to them."

Fr. Flanagan was a devout Catholic, a man whom Catholics and non-Catholics world-wide had deemed a hero. He was the Mother Theresa of his day.

Despite that, the Irish Church and the Irish authorities felt comfortable ignoring Fr. Flanagan, ignoring the fact that he was considered to be an expert in the matter of providing for the education and upbringing of boys who were otherwise considered to be "lost causes."

When he arrived back in America Fr. Flanagan said: "What you need over there is to have someone shake you loose from your smugness and satisfaction and set an example by punishing those who are guilty of cruelty, ignorance and neglect of their duties in high places... I wonder what God's judgment will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children."

There were plenty of voices then and plenty of strong voices at the top of the Department of Education and from those involved in child care in other countries who commented on what happened. Yet we allowed it to happen, and it continued to happen. Some of us worry that it may still be happening today in some institutions.

Today this House is showing that it is united on this motion and there is no political division. We have a purpose to ensure that this never happens again. The healing process is very important. I call on the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the Christian Brothers and the other congregations, to release their records of this time so that we can see exactly what was happening in these institutions. The whole truth must come out in the open and there must be total transparency. We must know why it was allowed to happen, why this evil was visited on these thousands of people whose lives have been marked forever. As a Parliament and a country all we can do is make reparation to them in a humble and a contrite way and make sure this never happens again.

See this speech in context