BishopAccountability.org
 
  Response to Irish Abuse Report

By Robert Mackey
New York Times
May 20, 2009

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/abuse-in-ireland-one-victim-responds/

[with video]

A decade after "States of Fear," a six-part documentary series about the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of Irish children in reform schools, orphanages and hospitals run by the Catholic Church, was broadcast on Irish television, a commission of inquiry set up in response to the allegations published its report on Wednesday in Dublin. According to one of the thousands of victims of abuse during this period, Colm O'Gorman, who was raped by a priest as a teenager, the abuses detailed in the 2,600-page report are "horribly, horribly shocking."

Mr. O'Gorman, who now runs the Irish branch of Amnesty International, has recently written a memoir, "Beyond Belief." On Wednesday he discussed the report and his own experience of abuse, during this interview with Jon Snow of Channel 4 News in London:

Mary Raftery, who produced the documentary "States of Fear," and wrote a book on the same subject, "Suffer The Little Children," spoke about the report in a radio interview with Ireland's state broadcaster, RTE, on Wednesday.

Last Saturday, Ms. Raftery explained in The Irish Times why the report took so long to complete:

The numbers applying to have their cases fully investigated, almost 2,000, were simply too large. Most had made allegations of abuse against several individuals. The commission faced the appalling vista of presiding over literally thousands of mini-trials, each one taking potentially days or even weeks to conclude.

Then there was the fact that, as Ms. Raftery wrote: "In addition to the scale of the task, a number of the key players proved distinctly unhelpful." The two main bodies with responsibility for Ireland's Church-run state schools, the Catholic Church and the Department of Education, were so unhelpful that the first head of the commission, Justice Mary Laffoy, resigned in protest in 2003. Ms. Raftery wrote last week:

The approach of the religious orders was described by the commission in 2003 as "adversarial and legalistic." The Department of Education, whose duty it was to inspect and regulate the bulk of the institutions, was refusing at that time to cooperate fully with the commission's demands for documents.

To overcome the objections of the church and the education bureaucracy, Ms. Raftery explains, the second head of the commission, Justice Seán Ryan, decided "to select only a limited number of cases for full hearing," and "announced in 2004 that the commission would no longer be naming any individuals who had not already been convicted in court."

As a result of these compromises, Ms. Raftery argues, no matter how scathing the final report, the commission failed to live up to expectations: "It made promises to victims that it was unable to keep. The commission might no longer fulfill its original commitment to reflect fully the experiences of all who testified before it, or even to expose the perpetrators."

 
 

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