Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The revelations in recent weeks about the extent of the gross sexual abuse inflicted on children in Blackrock College over decades are horrifying but we have come to the stage now that they are no longer surprising. How many times must be go through this process, order by order and diocese by diocese? We discovered the extent of the absolute destruction that paedophiles in the Catholic Church have wreaked on the lives of children. How many times must victims of these violent, powerful men be forced to sit down in front of a camera or microphone and relive the worst moments of their lives and retraumatise themselves in the public sphere out of sheer desperation for justice? I encourage everyone, especially those who are making decisions in respect of the next steps in this case, to go back and to listen to Colm O'Gorman on the radio last Sunday. One particular line that really stood out for me was when he said that we have to start talking about the cowardice of society and not the courage of victims. We need to have the courage as a nation to look our history in the eye and to do so now. We still have no concept of the true scale of the damage and hurt, and the deaths, the Catholic Church has inflicted. We have had glimpses of it and the scale of it has probably terrified the State.

Many victims want justice. They want those who destroyed their lives to face up to what they did and be held to account and, of course, they want redress. Any inquiry should not be dragged out for a long time but it should take the time it needs to be comprehensive. There must be a full public inquiry with powers of discovery and it must be tasked with scoping out where other investigations in the education system, or elsewhere, must happen. Is it is essential that the inquiry is public. The Spiritans cannot lead this process. The redress system run by the order is all well and good but it is a poor substitute for a true public investigation into what has happened in these schools and for an apology, convictions, if that is possible, transparency, accountability and redress. We know that at least 233 men have made allegations of child sexual abuse against 78 Irish priests from the Spiritans, with 57 of those cases having taken place at Blackrock College.

Only three of the priests accused of sexual abuse against children were convicted and only one of those has been removed from the priesthood, and that was at his own request. Some €5 million was paid out in settlements to victims and the men who destroyed their childhood were left to retire in comfort on Spiritan property. We need to properly come to terms with the systems at play which allowed these men to prey on vulnerable children with impunity. We know the ingredients - access to children by a trusted adult above reproach - but we also know that these people abused that trust and stole the innocence of children.

In the WhatsApp group for the Blackrock class of 1980, a man told his schoolmates that he had been abused by Father Senan Corry in Willow Park. "No one had a clue that he'd been interfered with", one of his classmates told The Sunday Times, but "at the same time I thought, did Corry not interfere with everybody?" In a book honouring deceased Spiritan members produced by the order, Corry, who died in 2004, was described as an entirely dedicated teacher, a man who would be remembered by generations of students for coaching junior rugby teams. Imagine a victim reading that?

There is no question that most priests in the school must have known what was going on and did nothing. There was no secrecy at play here. If clergy were not actively abusing children themselves, many were complicit in that abuse and should face consequences. We cannot continue with this piecemeal approach towards justice for victims of clerical abuse. The State has clear obligations to be proactive in uncovering human rights abuses and the provision of redress, and we are failing. We need a permanent office of investigation, not just for this issue but as an approach, with full legal powers to investigate these matters and others in the public interest. Such an office would retain vital expertise and knowledge, which are lost by the incremental approach to inquiries. Our current approach is not good enough at exposing the system at play, between individual audits, the State, the Vatican and within society as a whole. Even when we do expose historical abuse the State inflicts further damage to victims in the name of so-called redress.

In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, ruled that the State failed to protect Louise O’Keefe who was abused in her primary school in the 1970s. The State responded to that ruling with the most callous redress scheme one can imagine. This scheme required victims to prove to the State Claims Agency that the abuse inflicted upon them as children could not have been avoided and only made a paltry amount of redress available in the scheme to victims who had sued prior to an arbitrary date in 2021. Are the victims who do not sue less deserving of justice? We need to have a complete gear shift in how we treat survivors of abuse in this country. We have failed them from every angle and that needs to end. We need to see a different approach on this occasion.

The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O'Gorman, went through a whole list of things that have been done and I acknowledge the comments made in respect of Frances Fitzgerald. Tusla, however, does not have the capacity to deal with many of these historical cases. There is not the number of social workers that are needed and there are long delays. The Minister for Education, Deputy Foley, said that people felt entirely unsupported and that retraumatises people. If we are going to do this, we need to provide the capacity and resources to deal with it in a comprehensive and timely manner when people make complaints. If convictions can be secured, that must happen.

I would welcome the Minister’s comments on how she intends to proceed, the timeline she is working to and how she will engage with the Opposition.

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