Terry Leyden (Fianna Fail)

I hope everyone will be allowed to speak today and I strongly recommend that the Leader extend the time for the Order of Business because everyone should have an opportunity to express their abhorrence of what occurred over a long period in our society. I commend the Ryan report and very much regret that the victims were excluded from its launch yesterday. It was a shoddy launch that did not allow the victims to be given the report in a dignified way, and was an extension of their bad treatment.

The industrial schools were more like concentration camps than training camps. They were run by boot boys. It is appalling and horrible to think of the way innocent children were abused at those schools and we all stood idly by. Neighbours must have known what was going on. Lay people were also involved and they turned their heads. One brother who was not performing properly received a standing ovation when he came into his room because he had broken a child's jaw. It had been said that he was too soft. When we were in school in the 1950s the threat hung over every child that if he did not attend he would end up in an industrial school. We all experienced the gross physical punishment in Christian Brothers' schools. That is a fact. The leathers were probably made in Artane to allow the brothers to beat children. We were terrified.

I did, however, meet brothers of the highest calibre. It is easy to condemn but we must recognise the others such as one who meant a lot in my area, Brother Paul O'Dwyer, now deceased. He was exemplary in everything he did for us. Many brothers in the schools were top class. Let us be clear that there were two types of brother. We at least had secure family situations. I knew brothers who abused other boys who had stammers and destroyed their lives. Their parents tried to defend them but it was impossible to defend or help them at that stage. There were many types of abuse.

It was a horrible era in Irish life. It was a hidden, secretive period when all these situations were brushed under the carpet and ignored by everyone, including the Judiciary. One person wrote to a relative in the Judiciary to ask him to send more pupils to his school because it needed more money. That was the type of internal activity that was occurring. The State handed these children over.