Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of People Before Profit I express our solidarity to the victims. I thank those who came forward to raise this issue and brought it into the public eye. We owe them a deep debt of gratitude. There was something different about this particular revelation. We have been heaped with revelations of abuse of men, women and children by clerics and the churches over recent decades. What was different about this was the sense of shock across society that it involves a school such as Blackrock College in a middle class area where the parents had to pay hefty fees to have their boys educated. We might have assumed that children there would have the confidence to be able to articulate how they feel about what was going on and would prevent any sort of abuse in their lives. However, we saw horrifically that that was not the case.

A very good friend of mine, a wonderful articulate intelligent man, took his own life a few years ago and subsequently his brother took his life. Both of them attended Blackrock College. I will never know and their families will never know. If it was the case, they did not speak out about it.

The call from the victims for a full inquiry must be supported but the issue facing us in the Oireachtas is about the type of inquiry. As has been said, 233 men have come forward and the order has paid out €5 million in compensation. One of the most important things we can do for the victims is to conduct a criminal inquiry. It needs to be a criminal inquiry that his teeth and will also use Interpol to track down what happened throughout the lifetime of the record of abuse by this order.

A victim of the Jesuit Order in Belvedere College visited my clinic during the week as a consequence of the revelations. He said they want to see a criminal investigation of paedophiles. As we have seen, if a drug dealer travelled across the world dealing drugs and accumulating money from it, Interpol would help the Irish police to follow them around and to build a case against them.

Blackrock and the Spiritans showed, just as the mother and baby homes did, that the effects of abuse are not historical artefacts of a bygone era but that the trauma and suffering continue today. Making a statement and offering apologies is fine. However, we in the Dáil need to decide on the proper response of the State to the systemic and widespread abuse of women and children, and indeed of men by religious orders. To date we have failed miserably. We debated the redress scheme for mother and baby homes and all of the wrongs done to women. We have looked back at how inadequate the deal done by the former Minister, Dr. Michael Woods, was. We estimate that millions of euro are outstanding in restitution to the State from the church and the redress schemes have been totally inadequate.

The elephant in the room remains the control and dominance that the Catholic Church has over the education system and, in particular, over our heath and other vital public services. Years after the Ryan inquiry and decades after the scale of abuse in our church and institutions came to light, we have failed miserably to take the one action that would, more than any apology or compensation scheme, say that we have truly learned the lessons of the past. We have failed to separate church and State. We doubled down on it recently with the move of the National Maternity Hospital from Holles Street to St. Vincent's. Many of our hospitals are still under the control of religious orders on land owned by those orders and are subject to Canon Law and Catholic ethos. In recent years, Catholic religious orders worldwide have transferred their assets into Vatican-approved charities but the ethos continues. This sort of transfer is common throughout Ireland.

Some 95% of primary schools are denominational and 89% of those are run by the Catholic Church. The patron, the Catholic Church and the archbishop, determines the ethos of the school. It appoints the board of management and the board of management manages the school. The board of management is the teachers' employer. That might be fine if it was a private arrangement, but it is not. The State pays the teachers' salaries. It pays for the running of the school. It covers the bulk of capital costs, etc. Therefore, we have a religious education that is dedicated to a faith. We have a sex education system that is totally inadequate to give children the tools needed if they come across any attempt to abuse them in school, at home or in wider society.

In the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland schools remain exempt from employment equality legislation, meaning that teachers may be treated differently in the eyes of the law. The real honour that we can give the victims of abuse of any sort in the care of the State or the church is not to suggest that the State was blameless and compound the insult to those children and their families, but is actually to set about the real task of separating church and State. The State gained a lot by handing control of health and education over to the church back in the day, when the State was founded. It yielded in obedience and showed in a wider sense in society that people do speak up for themselves and that they must be humiliated and carry guilt. All of that has been expressed in the sort of society that Ireland has been up to now.

Thankfully, these people are speaking out. For many it is too late, including the young men across Ballyfermot who took their own lives having attended De la Salle College and other schools in the area. Many of them do not have a voice today but let us do the right thing by them all and end the legacy of the total connection of church and State in vital services, particularly in education and where children are concerned.

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