Revealed....six decades of ritual abuse at irish catholic schools

Revealed, six decades of 'ritual' child abuse: Catholic schools and orphanages damned in report

By
Tom Kelly
Last updated at 2:33 PM on 21st May 2009

Church leaders and government watchdogs covered up 'endemic' and 'ritualised' abuse of thousands of children in Roman Catholic schools and orphanages in the Irish Republic, a shocking report revealed yesterday. For six decades, priests and nuns terrorised boys and girls in the workhouse-style schools with sexual, physical and mental abuse.

Kevin Flannigan, right, and John Kelly, left,from the group Survivors of Child Abuse, protest at not being allowed into the launch of the long-awaited Child Abuse Commission report at the Conrad Hotel Dublin But officials in Ireland's Catholic Church shielded paedophile staff from arrest to protect their own reputations despite knowing they were serial attackers, according to the 2,600-page report, which took nine years to complete. Irish government inspectors also failed to stop the chronic beatings, rape and humiliation, it found.


Justice Sean Ryan launches the report at the Conrad Hotel in Dublin today - but refuses to take questions from journalists About 35,000 children and teenagers who were orphans, petty thieves, truants, unmarried mothers or from dysfunctional families were sent to Ireland's network of 250 Church-run industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s up until the early 1990s.


The report by Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse found 'a climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys'. It added: 'Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.' Judge Sean Ryan, who chaired the commission, said that when confronted with evidence of sex abuse, religious authorities responded by moving the sex offenders to another location, where in many instances they were free to abuse again. 'There was evidence that such men took up teaching positions sometimes within days of receiving dispensations because of serious allegations or admissions of sexual abuse,' the
report said. 'The safety of children in general was not a consideration.' The leader of Ireland's four million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady, said he was 'sorry and deeply ashamed' after the report was published yesterday. 'Children deserved better and especially from those caring for them in the name of Jesus Christ,' he said. The report found that molestation and rape were 'endemic' in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless. 'In some schools a high level of ritualised beating was routine,' the report said. 'Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body. Personal and family denigration was widespread.' Victims of the system have long demanded that the truth of their experiences be documented and made public.


But some victims' groups said the report didn't go far enough, particularly because there will not be any prosecutions as a result. This is because in 2004 the Christian Brothers secured a ruling that guaranteed all of its members, dead or alive, would remain anonymous in the report. John Kelly, from victim group Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, said the report should have examined how children like himself were taken away from parents without just cause, and why Irish governments ceded control over the lives of so many young people to the Church.


Children at work in one of the notorious Magdalen asylum,

earlier this summer he said any apologies offered now were 'hollow, shallow and have no substance or merit at all'. The group's John Walsh said he felt 'cheated and deceived' that the perpetrators would not be brought to justice. Mr Walsh said: 'I would have never opened my wounds if I'd known this was going to be the end result. It has devastated me and will devastate most victims because there are no criminal proceedings and no accountability whatsoever.' The victims were also banned from entering the Press conference on the report held in a Dublin hotel. Ellen
O'Malley-Dunlop, chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said of the victims: 'The way that they have been treated here has been disgraceful and is in effect little more than a repetition of abusive behaviour.'


Key steps in struggle to confront child abuse in the Catholic Church

June 1994
Catholic
priest Brendan Smyth pleads guilty to 17 counts of indecently
assaulting five girls and two boys in Belfast. His order, the
Norbertines, spent decades shuttling him among Irish and American
parishes and harbored Smyth from British arrest.

November 1994
Taoiseach
Albert Reynolds resigns, and his government collapses, amid claims that
his attorney general colluded with church authorities to delay the
British extradition demand for Smyth. It shatters the taboo against
pursuing criminal charges against priests.

July 1995
Former
altar boy Andrew Madden becomes first person to speak publicly about
abuse by a priest. Madden says the Church paid him €35,000 to keep
quiet about three years of assaults by Fr Ivan Payne. Archbishop
Desmond Connell denies the deal until Madden provides documentary proof
of church payoff. Case spurs hundreds to pursue civil lawsuits against
church authorities.

January 1996
Panel
of Irish Catholic leaders instruct bishops to tell senior police
officers ‘without delay’ about all suspected sex-abuse cases. Some
bishops continue to suppress such information over the coming decade.

February 1996
Dear
Daughter, a documentary shown on RTÉ details abuse suffered by
Christine Buckley and others at St Vincent's Industrial School,
Goldenbridge, Inchicore, Dublin.

July 1997
After
serving prison term in Northern Ireland, Smyth is extradited south and
pleads guilty to 74 counts of sexually abusing 20 boys and girls
between 1958 and 1993. He dies of a heart attack one month into 12 year
sentence.

January 1998
Payne is convicted in Dublin on 14 counts of sexually abusing eight boys aged 11 to 14. He serves only four years in prison.

March 1999
Fr
Sean Fortune commits suicide in prison while awaiting trial on 66
criminal charges of molesting and raping 29 boys in the southeast Ferns
diocese. One Fortune victim, former altar boy Colm O'Gorman, launches
victims support group One in Four. It lobbies government for
investigations into abuse cases, particularly in Ferns.

April 1999
Groundbreaking
documentary series ‘States of Fear’ by RTÉ exposes abuse of children in
church-run workhouses, reformatories and orphanages since the 1940s.

May 1999
Taoiseach
Bertie Ahern issues ‘long overdue apology’ to all those abused in
church-run institutions and vows to establish a financial compensation
board and a fact-finding commission into extent of abuse. Ms Justice
Mary Laffoy is appointed to head the Commission to Inquire into Child
Abuse.

May 2000
Government
gives investigatory powers to Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse to
measure causes and extent of unchecked child abuse in institutions from
1937 onward.

July 2001
The deadline for complaints of abuse to be made to the Commission. Some 3,149 people ask to testify.

April 2002
Ferns
Bishop Brendan Comiskey becomes first, and only, church figure to
resign because of failures to stop abuse. He admits he did too little
to stop pedophile priests.

December 2002
Government
establishes board to pay compensation to people who suffered sexual,
physical or mental abuse in church-run institutions. Payouts require
claimants to give up their right to sue church and state authorities.
Taxpayers, not the church, cover bulk of cost.

September 2003
High
Court Judge Mary Laffoy resigns complaining that the Department of
Education, which holds most records on church-run institutions, is
obstructing her investigation into child abuse. Her successor, Justice
Sean Ryan, says probe must severely limit the number of abuse cases it
considers or it will never finish.

April 2004
A
Vatican modernizer and diplomat, Diarmuid Martin, replaces Connell as
Dublin archbishop. Pledges full cooperation with state and police in
exposing past cover-ups of abuse and protecting children in future.

June 2004
Judge
Ryan announces the Commission will not name abusers unless they have
been convicted. The Christian Brothers religious order drops legal
actions against the Commission.

July 2004
The
Christian Brothers testify at a public hearing that files only recently
discovered in its Rome-based archive show evidence of 30 canonical
trials of brothers based on proven incidents of child sexual abuse
against boys in their care from the 1930s onwards.

October 2005
Investigation
led by retired Supreme Court justice finds that church, police and
state authorities did too little to stop sexual abuse of hundreds of
children by 21 priests in Ferns. Report says Ferns bishops sheltered
and promoted priests known to have raped altar boys and molested
schoolgirls on an altar.

December 2005
Residential
Institutions Redress Board says more than 14,000 people who claim to
have suffered childhood abuse in church-run institutions have filed
claims for state payouts.

December 2008
Board
says it has paid nearly 12,000 victims average of €64,230 each, about
2,000 claims remain. Cost including lawyers' fees expected to reach
€1.1bn.

May 20, 2009
Commission
to Inquire into Child Abuse unveils 2,575-page report into thousands of
child abuse cases in institutions. Two more reports into the church's
protection of sex-predator priests in the Dublin archdiocese and the
southwest diocese of Cloyne may be published later this year.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1184828/Revealed-decades-ritual-child-abuse-Catholic-schools-orphanages-damned-report.html

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Just found this report on the net after hearing a little on the news
about it.What a frigging mess.How dare they cover up such sickening
attacks on these people.Who the hell gives them the rights to treat others this way,it makes me sick

I agree with capitol punishment and im sorry but each and every one of these sickos need hanging.slowly. And anyone who tries to cover, protect, and lie for them also needs hanging aswel, because imo only an evil twisted being would ever do something like this to other people,and only twisted evil folk would cover for them.They are all as bad as one another.

Those nuns and priests should be put into a room so the survivors of the abuse they so cruelly carried out over the years, can beat the sh/t out of them and smash them about a bit.

They call themselves gods people ????more like bloody servants of the devil.

''The leader of Ireland's four million Catholics, Cardinal Sean Brady,
said he was 'sorry and deeply ashamed' after the report was published yesterday.''

B@LL@X.......Complete and utter cr@p.Just like a book..you can read them all....they look through rose tinted glasses for as long as they possible can and then when the truth come out.........they say OMG Im ashamed and sorry cant believe this as gone on etc etc........... that's doesn't help the thousands of adults that are out there picking up the pieces,trying to ignore the familiar feeling of hurt when you try to rest your head at night...........and why???because someone else cant keep their frigging hands and d/cks to themselves..........hang the lot of them.They have no rights,they gave them away when they decided it was ok to beat and rape those kids.They don't deserve to have a say in court,none of them do.

Goes to show doesn't it you can stick a poxy black or white coat on, shove a collar round your neck and people think your a respectable person!!!!!!!!! Never judge a book by its cover!!!!

they shall all go to hell,there is no place in heaven for their sorts, even if they turn up in their white collars and cloaks.....its a mask,a mask used to get close to kids and abuse them.

Sick, each and every one of them are.
argh it annoys me so much who the hell do they think they are, how can another person decide to hurt another person this way without any consideration for their feelings....... why do they do they do these things?Why do they think that its ok to do these things to poeple???what do theythink those kids have done, or not done, to deserve that sh/t.....my mind works overtime sometimes wondering why there are people like this on our planet,and why they choose these poeple to abuse,its not nice,they should all be put down.

As you may know, I have a simple faith. God, the devil, Jesus, heaven and earth. The people who committed those atrocities were supposed to have been 'called' by God for something better. The nun's, the priests, people who were supposed to have been spiritually superior. All that they did, the rapes, the beatings, was done wearing God's uniform. Yet it says something in the Bible about children, something like, 'I will smite those that cause them to stumble and fall' For any ordinary person, such things will ensure damnation. But for those who did what they did as a servant of God, I think he has a very special place reserved in the foulest corner of hell for those creatures.

vee8 wrote:As you may know, I have a simple faith. God, the devil, Jesus, heaven and earth. The people who committed those atrocities were supposed to have been 'called' by God for something better. The nun's, the priests, people who were supposed to have been spiritually superior. All that they did, the rapes, the beatings, was done wearing God's uniform. Yet it says something in the Bible about children, something like, 'I will smite those that cause them to stumble and fall' For any ordinary person, such things will ensure damnation. But for those who did what they did as a servant of God, I think he has a very special place reserved in the foulest corner of hell for those creatures.

Truly DISGUSTING...........they must have felt so helpless..........

vee8 wrote:As you may know, I have a simple faith. God, the devil, Jesus, heaven and earth. The people who committed those atrocities were supposed to have been 'called' by God for something better. The nun's, the priests, people who were supposed to have been spiritually superior. All that they did, the rapes, the beatings, was done wearing God's uniform. Yet it says something in the Bible about children, something like, 'I will smite those that cause them to stumble and fall' For any ordinary person, such things will ensure damnation. But for those who did what they did as a servant of God, I think he has a very special place reserved in the foulest corner of hell for those creatures.

vee8 i particularly like this bit from the bible as you said ......................'I will smite those that cause them to stumble and fall'.........thats comforting to know i suppose for many people, weather you believe in the bible or not. Sort of a reassurance from the one and only person who can play god that you might act your ways out and get away with it here, but you will pay the price later. Cheers i like that saying...........i hope its true aswel!!!

these people(if thats what they are to be called) get away with far to much.To be honest i sometimes blame the system.Not for them doing the stuff they do as such,but for them re-offending and not being dealt with properly.They should be locked up and never released.They are not fit to be around people and therefore should be kept from them.I think they should be given another name anyway.they cant be classed as the same as the rest of us,they are more like doom'mans,not humans.