IRELAND
Irish Times
Ruadhan Mac Cormaic
For Louise O’Keeffe, the veteran of a long, drawn-out campaign that began more than 15 years ago, this was a resounding vindication.
O’Keeffe, then aged nine, was abused by Leo Hickey, the former principal of Dunderrow National School in Co Cork in the early 1970s. At issue here was whether the State was partly to blame for that abuse because of its failure to prevent and detect it. By 11 votes to six, the Grand Chamber concluded that it was. Ireland, it found, was in breach of two articles, 3 and 13, of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibit inhuman and degrading treatment and set down the right to an effective remedy.
“The Court found that it was an inherent obligation of a Government to protect children from ill-treatment, especially in a primary education context. That obligation had not been met when the Irish State, which had to have been aware of the sexual abuse of children by adults prior to the 1970s . . . nevertheless continued to entrust the management of the primary education of the vast majority of young Irish children to National Schools.”
Effective control
Crucially, in the court’s view, the State did this without putting in place any mechanisms of effective State control against the risks of such abuse occurring. On the contrary, potential complainants had been directed away from the State authorities and towards the managers (generally the local priest) of the national schools. Any system of detection and reporting of abuse which allowed over 400 incidents of abuse to occur in O’Keeffe’s school for such a long time, the judges remarked, had to be considered ineffective.
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