hdog said. The horrific details of neglect, physical abuse and rape were revealed in four state-ordered reports - the Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne reports.Colm O'Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, said: "The abuse of tens of thousands of Irish children is perhaps the greatest human rights failure in the history of the state. Much of the abuse described in the Ryan Report meets the legal definition of torture under international human rights law. Children were tortured. They were brutalised, beaten, starved and abused. There has been little justice for these victims. Those who failed as guardians, civil servants, clergy, gardai and members of religious orders have avoided accountability."
Amnesty's a new report, In Plain Sight, prepared by Dr Carole Holohan, explored why it had happened - and to ensure it never happened again.
Mr O'Gorman said: "This abuse happened not because we didn't know about it, but because many people across society turned a blind eye to it. It is not true that everyone knew, but deep veins of knowledge existed across Irish society and people in positions of power ignored their responsibility to act. Attitudes to poverty at both the public and political level, were also significant factors. Society judged and criminalised children for being poor rather than address the underlying factors that condemned their families to poverty." Mr O'Gorman said Amnesty's research had shown that the true scandal was not that the system failed children, but that there had been no functioning system. "Instead, children were abandoned to a chaotic, unregulated arrangement where no-one was accountable for failures to protect and care for them,"
In November 2009, the Murphy Report found four successive archbishops in Dublin had covered up allegations of abuse and had not reported claims to gardai for decades. Six months earlier, the damning Ryan Report shocked the nation with revelations that tens of thousands of children had been neglected and suffered physical and sexual abuse for decades in orphanages, industrial schools and residential institutions run by religious orders. And the Ferns Report, published in October 2005, revealed more than 100 allegations had been made against 21 priests over 40 years - with the Catholic Church hierarchy putting the interests of priests before children.
SOYMB says it was the political power that the Catholic Church once exercised in Ireland that allowed it to cover up for so long the child abuse. The guilt of the Church was, and is, in the appalling fact that in order to preserve its awesome power over its credulous membership it was prepared to protect those engaged in the most vile practices against children.
When the British withdrew from the greater part of Ireland there was no discernable concern about the Catholic Church becoming almost wholly responsible for the general ‘education’ of the young, including places of care and security like orphanages and juvenile penal institutions. Governance over education was clearly prescribed under the Church’s Code of Canon Law cc. 1381, 1382. Control of the minds of the young was vital to the adult acceptance of the outrageous basis of religious belief. The church’s dirty washing was becoming public. They were not just a few "bad apples" but whole orchards of them - priests, nuns and Christian Brothers remained in the fold to torture and rape innocent children whose care they had been charged with.
Eventually public disquiet became so clamorous that the Irish government, fearful of legal action by victims for dereliction of the State’s duty of care had to do something about it. Given the abundance of proven cases not only in Ireland but in other countries throughout the world where paedophile Irish priests had been moved by church authorities in order to escape the opprobrium that their public conviction would bring on the Church, it was reasonable to expect swift and intensive action into sources of information that would help the Authorities to get details of the identity of the criminals and their current location. But the Garda did not bring their battering rams to the doors of Bishoprics where such information might be found. Not a single officer of the Church who was complicit in withholding information into these utterly heinous crimes appeared in the dock. Instead the state went into negotiations with the church authorities about setting up a Commission of Enquiry into the disgustingly unsavoury affair and the church authorities - presumably the cardinal and the bishops - agreed to co-operate with the Enquiry on the basis of an undertaking from the State that it (the church authorities) would not have to reveal the identity of its miscreants and that the Church’s liability for financial compensation to victims should be capped at some 128 million euro. This latter is estimated at 1.3 billion euros which leaves the Irish taxpayer liable for some one billion euros for the crimes of the clergy.
The Ryan Commission heard evidence from literally thousands of victims into rape, buggery and brutality in Catholic institutions where children and young people had been placed by the State for care and protection over a period of some four decades. The Enquiry took ten years and its conclusion was that these utterly depraved practices were ’endemic’ in such institutions. It is hard to imagine the magnitude of suffering inflicted on children of all ages over decades by brutal priests and nuns numerously permeated into a grossly arrogant and sanctimonious church whose maintained code of silence must surely have equalled the evil of its debauched clerics.
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