Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

It is with tremendous sadness that I again contribute to deeply important statements on abuse at certain education institutions, specifically Willow Park Junior School and Blackrock College, which are located in the geographic heart of my constituency. I will speak about four issues, namely, first and foremost, the survivors, as well as the broader school community in my constituency, the institutional and State response and clerical abuse more generally in Ireland.

Like every other Deputy who has spoken has done, I offer my deepest concern and sympathies to each of the survivors of this abuse for the physical and emotional pain they suffered as children, for the damaged memories and damaged relationships, for the secrecy forced on them, for the totally unjustified but often described "shame" put on them through absolutely no fault of their young innocent selves, for the burden they have had to carry through their adult lives, for the ways they have found to cope and to manage and for the bravery they have found to highlight the abuse done to them by vicious, vile men for whom no punishment can ever be sufficient.

I acknowledge the role of RTÉ’s “Documentary on One” and Joe Duffy's "Liveline" in bringing this story into the bright light, but it had already begun with victims speaking to one another on social media, connecting and sharing and amplifying one another’s experience. The many survivors who have so bravely made their experience public - I pay tribute to Mark and David Ryan, Aidan Moore, Edward Herron, John Coulter, Corry McMahon, Louis Hoffman and Philip Feddis, to name but some of them - have given the freedom to others to recollect and disclose if they have wished to do so, to talk or not to talk, and they have pulled back a most distasteful veil that lay over a violent and viscous past.

As they have said and has been noted in the House, what is needed now is a victim or survivor-centred, survivor-led process that will enable the best of reparation and healing available. I acknowledge, as the Minister did, that that will be different for different people, and I urge the Government, in its communication with survivors, to continue to reflect on what model may best meet those needs, which she has indicated she is doing. My view is that a strong scoping exercise and a strengthening of the impact of the confidential committee within the inquiry model may - I stress "may" - help give much greater weight to the stories told by the survivors than was the case in previous inquest models, survivors who were voiceless in their abuse but need not be voiceless anymore. Their voices are the ones that should direct the next stages, and I was pleased to hear that approach expressed by the Minister.

There is a broader school community that is hurting deeply. Willow Park and Blackrock College are located in my constituency. I have spoken to parents of students who attend the school today, to parents who attended the school 20 and 30 years ago and whose children attend today, and to people who left the school many years ago. My son attends the school, and my nephews and members of my husband’s family either attend or once attended the school. Families throughout my constituency, from Booterstown and Blackrock to Shankill, have a connection with the school, whether a brother, uncle or other family member. The school is embedded throughout the community through many families, and so many people have a connection to it now or did so in the past. Everybody in that community has been impacted by these revelations of abuse.

There are people, of course, who knew directly already through personal or family experience. Some people knew less. They knew of things that had happened to friends or family but had no idea of the broader scale. Other people knew nothing, yet voiced suspicions about this priest or that in the past. Let us not forget, most importantly, that some on the school campus knew quite a lot and did and said nothing.

From my interactions as a constituency representative for Dún Laoghaire and as a member of that school community, I have witnessed the high volume of communication that has happened over the past number of weeks in Blackrock in the most direct way through email and in the most innocuous way by children running to their parents at the edge of the pitch during rugby or soccer games. It seems that most of the broader school community genuinely did not know. People are coming to terms with the fact that this happened, perhaps even while they were there. They are only understanding now the real pain their peers went through and what they experienced. This community is hurting, appropriately so, but hurting, nonetheless.

I acknowledge the response of the Blackrock past pupils' union, which appears to have tried to take steps to offer total solidarity to those survivors and the community. It might seem like a small thing in the round, but its immediate cancellation of its annual lunch was an important gesture available to it and a symbol of solidarity. Ironically, there was some criticism of having cancelled the lunch because people wanted to come together to discuss this openly as a community, which I understand. Overall, however, the decision was the correct one. People simply cannot carry on as normal when something of this nature comes out. It was an appropriate reaction. I took heart from the fact that the criticism was there and people really wanted to come together to talk.

Part of the school community, of course, are the boys and young men who are in the school today. Boys aged from eight to 18, and younger, are certainly well able to discern what is being discussed about their own school in the media and other places. First and foremost, there is an essential need to protect all the boys from harm from any source. I will come back to that. However, there is also a measure of care needed by the school community broadly about how this is discussed with them, particularly the younger boys, to ensure that they manage this news about their own community well and that, crucially, everybody learns from it for the future.

How do we respond? What is the future? First, we need to do is ensure the protection of the boys in school today in Willow Park, Blackrock and, indeed, every school throughout Ireland. On this, I have deeply interrogated the current principal of Willow Park, who has been there since just 2016. I did so initially as a parent, through the Willow Park parents' association, with which there has been deep engagement on behalf of the parents and extensive information made available but also, of course, as a local representative with a deep concern for the school and school community. I deeply interrogated him in person, and I believe that the boys there are well protected and cared for today. The principal has made himself available to any parent who wants to talk in more detail. I am confident that any information in his hands will be made available to any inquiry or model established by the Government and that his approach is one of total openness.

It is important to say that the boys today are protected because of a genuine cultural shift from secrecy to transparency generally in Ireland, however, and in particular the response of Government. The Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, specifically referenced the former Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Ms Frances Fitzgerald. Ms Fitzgerald stood up to the Catholic Church in 2011 and told the authorities she was legislating for mandatory sexual abuse reporting, no matter what. That followed the publication of the Cloyne report, which documented abuse in that diocese up to 2007.

I was there with the former Minister. As recently as 2011, the Catholic Church tried to resist mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse, using the completely useless legal and even more morally bankrupt argument, that the value of the seal of the confessional somehow competed with the reporting of child sexual abuse. I was Frances Fitzgerald’s special adviser at the time. It is to her eternal credit, supported by the then Taoiseach, Mr. Enda Kenny, that she faced down the men of the church in those weeks and went ahead in no uncertain terms thereafter to put the Children First principles, which had hitherto been guidelines only, into a statutory mandatory reporting space. That was among the first cultural shifts in Government that mattered. The measures outlined by the Minister, Deputy Foley, in her contribution and indeed, by the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, the Children First Act and other various processes follow that cultural shift away from what children knew then. In the words of a Willow Park graduate, which appeared in an article on The Irish Timeson 20 November, "Like every one of that generation, I knew instinctively that any complaints against a priest would be futile and that they would likely assume it was my fault."

The real measure of response now is how we atone for the secrecy and hurt of the past. The only acceptable response now from every school involved and, indeed, every congregation and order, whatever the structures - I am past caring about the distinctions - is, as Deputy Bacik said, acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and a new openness, honesty, humility and accuracy. Every record should be made proactively available. Powers of compellability should not be necessary in respect of institutions that are proactively falling over themselves offering to help. These are the basic respects that are needed. This is what survivors and the school community deserve. This is the standard of protection children of the future deserve. Irrespective of the model agreed by Government next, that is the way for schools and congregations to genuinely lead now into the future, where their past has been such a sorry shame.

The rape and torture by grown men of young boys that happened in Willow Park and Blackrock was not limited to those schools, nor any of the schools discussed here today. It was a feature of Ireland of that time, and we hope it will never, ever be repeated. There can be nothing worse than a person having that secret hanging over his or whole life into adult life. Much of this happened in a different time, in a different culture. We were affected by this terrible evilness right across Ireland. It was so hurtful and damaging for the children who, as adults, are naturally still affected by it. My heart goes out to them and their families; their parents, siblings and friends. As we move to the future, however, we must do so in a way that shows absolutely no remnants of the tragedy and violence of the past.

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