Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. I dtús báire, ba mhaith liom a rá cé chomh bródúil agus atá mé as mo chomhghleacaithe Fhine Gael, na Seanadóirí Seery Kearney agus Doherty, a rinne a lán oibre ar an rún seo agus a chuir roimh an Seanad é. Táimid ag labhairt faoi ábhar an-tábhachtach ar fad. Is ábhar deacair é ach is ábhar tábhachtach é chomh maith ar chóir dúinn labhairt agus ceisteanna a chur faoi freisin. I pay tribute to my Fine Gael colleagues, Senators Seery Kearney and Doherty. This is a difficult thing to talk about but it is absolutely right and appropriate that we should. It is right and appropriate that we should be willing as a House to take on the issues that are contained in the report.

I have heard the speeches of other Senators and I was particularly struck by what Senator Clonan said. Obviously he has a different perspective, having done the amount of work he did in regard to sexual abuse and sexual violence within the Defence Forces and there is a report on that as well, which is also deeply disturbing. It makes one wonder what is wrong in our society that these events were allowed to occur. The occurrence of them, in and of themselves, is less shocking than the cover up, the actions that ordinary people appear to take to deem them somehow acceptable or worthy of being swept under the carpet, put to one side, or that somehow an institutional reputation comes ahead of the basic human dignity of the victims of these offences.

I worked for many years as a criminal barrister so I have seen similar offences from both sides of the fence. Senator Clonan said there is never a justification, moral or otherwise, for sexual abuse of a child or of anyone. There is no justification. There is no legal defence to that. It is not something that can ever be explained away. That is why what strikes me most about this report is the fact that an institution, made up of individuals, people who know what they are doing, came together and decided that the right thing to do was to protect the institutional reputation of St. John Ambulance, which we have heard today is now in tatters and lacks any credibility in terms of its moral standing with anyone in Ireland. People who may not have been involved in the actual criminal activity saw fit to protect an institution over the individuals who they knew had been wronged. They knew individuals had been the subject of appalling crimes. I do not seek to prejudice any further criminal proceedings that might come out of this but Senator Boyhan is quite right. This is criminal activity of an extraordinarily serious level. Notwithstanding the fact that I have worked with people in this area, I cannot profess to understand any person who thinks it is acceptable, reasonable or in any way justifiable to take any kind of step to cover these things up or to put the reputational benefit of an institution ahead of victims. St. John Ambulance is an example of that.

Unfortunately, however, in the last generation or two we have seen so many institutions implicated, such as the scouts. I was involved in the scouts. It is a wonderful organisation on one level and yet again there is this cancer within it that has allowed individuals somehow not to be able to see the wood for the trees and think that cover up is the way to go. It was the same in other sporting organisations in Ireland. The Catholic Church is an obvious example as well. These involve ostensibly good people who have made appalling decisions. I cannot understand what motivated them, but people decided that it was somehow better to move a priest out of a particular parish and into another parish where he could do exactly the same damage. That is perhaps the issue that is most difficult to grasp. I say that as somebody who has not experienced this. The issues for those who experienced it are enormous and most of us can never properly understand. As a bystander, a legislator, a public representative and as a lawyer looking at what is in this report, I cannot fathom what they thought they were doing. I cannot fathom how they felt that this was the right course of action, not to intervene and protect, not to put in place measures to stop this from happening, to ensure it would not happen again. They did not do that. They did exactly the opposite. They allowed it to continue.

I feel better that the Minister, Deputy O'Gorman, is dealing with it because he is someone who has dealt with difficult issues in his brief as Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. He has seen this and taken concrete steps. I have faith that he will be able to do what needs to be done on this. However, it is not a small job, because of the depth of depravity involved, not in committing the crimes, we can all see that, but in other people who had supervisory and managerial roles to decide to cover it up, to protect the institutional reputation over young people. I cannot understand that.

The job that falls to the Minister and to his Department is enormous because it goes well beyond St. John Ambulance. This is just one report but the contents of it are so shocking, depraved and so difficult for any reasonable person to understand that the job the Minister and his Department have now is enormous. First and foremost they need to root out whether there are other organisations that we have not yet heard of, where other children are in danger that we do not know about. Like Senator Hoey, I have run out of time to talk about the Tusla dimension of this and the chasm there as well. Even in cases we know about, the job that has to be done to deal with the situation, to possibly rectify it which is probably impossible, but more importantly to put in place systems that can reliably work to solve this problem to even a small degree, is an enormous task. I have confidence that the Minister is a well-placed person to do this. I have faith in his commitment to doing it, above everything else, which is half the battle.

I know that I am over time but Senators Seery Kearney and Doherty have been extremely vocal on this issue for many weeks. If Senator Doherty was here she would have a great deal more focused things to say, rather than standing here flapping her thumbs in disbelief which is really what I am doing. It is difficult not to be appalled on any level by what is in this report. It is a stain on the State as well as the organisation. The other thing is that the people who sought to protect the institutional reputation of one body have actually damaged the reputation of a whole country. That is the terrible shame of it that will stick with us for generations.