– nine-year report
DUBLIN, (Reuters) – Priests beat and raped children during decades of abuse in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland, an official report said yesterday, but it stopped short of naming the perpetrators.
Orphanages and industrial schools in 20th century Ireland were places of fear, neglect and endemic sexual abuse, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse said in a harrowing five-volume report that took nine years to compile.
The Commission, chaired by a High Court judge, blasted successive generations of priests, nuns and Christian Brothers — a Catholic religious order — for beating, starving and, in some cases raping, children in Ireland’s now defunct network of industrial and reformatory schools from the 1930s onwards.
“When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again,” the report said.
“Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.”
The report slammed the Department of Education for its failure to stop the crimes. In rare cases when it was informed of sexual abuse, “it colluded in the silence”, the report said.
Successful legal action by the Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys in the country, led the Commission to drop its original intention to name the people against whom the allegations were made.
No abusers will be prosecuted as a result of the inquiry.
John Kelly, coordinator of the Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA) group, said there could be no closure without accountabilty.
“I have been getting phone calls all day from former residents, they feel their wounds have been reopened for nothing,” he told Reuters. “They were promised justice by the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) in 1999 and they feel cheated. They expected that the abusers would face prosecution.”
The Christian Brothers said they were appalled at the revelations but denied that their lawsuit had obstructed the report. “We are deeply sorry, deeply regretful for what has been put before us today,” Brother Edmund Garvey said.
