Any views I express are my own. I don’t represent nor am I represented by any survivors’ group. In some of my remarks, I refer to my own case but much of what I say may apply to other victims of abuse. As will be obvious from this submission, I am not an expert in any field relevant to matters I discuss. My only expertise is that I endured horrendous experiences nearly forty years ago as a child and I have lived with the consequences daily ever since. Poor literacy is one of the consequences. This now handicaps me in writing this submission so I ask you please to bear with me.
1. Secret Records held by Defendants.
The DES was chief among the public bodies that administered Ireland’s child prison system—the vast Irish gulag in which many illegally held child prisoners came to appalling harm(1* see footnotes). The DES subcontracted the residential care and education of the child prisoners to a ragbag of religious sects including the ICB (Irish Christian Brothers). These sects were funded, supervised and regulated by the DES and they were required to keep records to be shown to the DES inspector. I was a prisoner at Artane, a Dublin prison camp operated by the ICB.
The DES and the ICB kept general records on the gulag and personal records on the prisoners and their families.
I hold the DES and the ICB (among others) responsible for abuse I suffered while in illegal detention at Artane. The DES and the ICB are now preventing me seeing certain records relating to my detention. Technical reasons are given for non-disclosure, but since both parties deny responsibility for the harm I suffered in their prison, avoidance of liability is the probable reason for this secrecy. Much about my detention and the events surrounding it was hidden from me at the time by secrecy, lies and the censoring of my personal mail. More secrecy and lies are now being used to prevent me discovering the facts. The embargo on these records prevents closure of a painful period in my personal history. Besides this, it may affect whether I can participate in the Commission’s investigation.
Minister Martin paid lip-service to the idea of openness when he told the Dáil in May 1999:—
The apology issued by the Taoiseach on behalf of the State and of all the citizens of the State was intended as a simple but fundamental demonstration that the Government is determined to throw up the shutters on the past, to learn its lessons and do all that can be done to heal its lasting wounds.
The shutters have remained firmly closed. After describing an attempted cover-up of gulag child abuse by department officials, Mr Martin said:—
This episode demonstrates, I believe, the need for everything to be out in the open.
Department officials have done everything in their power to prevent me obtaining records.
Minister Woods assured the Senate in April 2000:—
All files have been made open to the people, and their solicitors, who have allegations or concerns about abuse. Everything is open and transparent...
This was untrue then, and is still untrue. The Minister was either hopelessly misinformed or he was being less than frank. The Department is withholding from me six personal records and an indefinite number of relevant non-personal records.
The Irish Christian Brothers have repeatedly claimed in public that they are co-operating with all inquiries. They have sent me three personal records but refuse to co-operate with my request for further information.
It is unacceptable that these defendant parties should be in a position to prevent victims obtaining access to personal and public records. This is why I have suggested that an independent body should hold these records and be empowered to make impartial decisions on access. The defendant parties have been allowed to conceal and for all we know tamper with, evidence essential to the victims and to the inquiry .
At the end of this submission I include a copy of some questions I have raised with the DES. I am told that it is unlikely the Department will answer these questions but that the Commission should be able to do so. I ask the Commission to confirm that it will answer these questions.
2. Secrecy and the DES Commission’s Investigations
I have a copy of the Commission’s 29 June Statement outlining the proposed investigation procedure. I will now use this to show how secrecy would affect me as a complainant in such an investigation.
The DES Commission informs me that it cannot assist me, or other complainants in getting access to records from the DES or elsewhere.
The DES Commission has or can gain possession of DES and ICB records (including those denied to me). It can use the records for its own purposes - one purpose being to check the veracity of my testimony—but it cannot or will not disclose these records to me. Records already released contain misinformation and scandalous lies about myself and my family. It is unacceptable to me that any record could be used to check my statement while I am unable to challenge the content of the record.
If I request an investigation of the abuse I suffered, a preliminary inquiry would take evidence from me and from the respondents. The inquiry officer can request documents from either side. Each side would get copies of evidence submitted by the other side.
Should a committee investigate the abuse I suffered, I would be invited to testify and could be questioned on my testimony by the Commissioners and cross-questioned by the ICB (perpetrators)(2* see footnotes).
There is a problem here for me. The DES, the ICB and the DES Commission will each be in possession of information to which they have denied me access, while each will be allowed to question me on my testimony. I think your Counsel Mr Clarke, will confirm that he would advise any client of his not to testify in these circumstances—and he will be able to give the reasons for this advice.
Closed records could contain evidence essential to the testimony I would wish to give. I will be prevented from using this evidence whereas it could be used against me. I understand that I would get to see any such record only in the unlikely event it is submitted as evidence by a defendant party—unlikely, since the probable reason for non-disclosure is that the records might assist my case—or damage a defendants case. The defendants can select and submit the records that support their case. I am not given this privilege. I can use only those records I have been allowed to see. Records relevant to my case could remain hidden from me forever on grounds of "public interest", "legal privilege", or some other technicality. I must accept on trust the validity of these classifications. The DES Commission proposes to place me in a position where I am expected to trust those whom I have no reason to trust and every reason not to.
The defendants have always been secretive. They have used secrecy and lies for decades to conceal and deny what was taking place in the gulag. They now deny liability for the injury they caused me, so their secrecy was to be expected, but how do we explain or justify the DES Commission’s secrecy on the embargoed records? Whatever the reason, this secrecy will prevent the truth being revealed and will disadvantage me at an investigation committee.
If this is to be the procedure, then I and probably others, would be prevented from testifying. Please let me know whether I have outlined the procedure correctly. If Mr Clarke would advise me to testify in these circumstances, I would need to have this advice explained to me.
3. Conflict of Interest—Seconded Staff
The engagement of DES staff by the DES Commission introduces an unacceptable conflict of interest. This creates problems that ramify on all aspects of the DES Commission’s functions. It poses so many problems that we have to wonder why the Commissioners created the conflict of interest and why they continue to entertain it.
The Education Department wrote the rulebook for the inquiry (the CICA Act). It was to be expected that the rules would favour the DES and its co-defendants and long-time partners in the gulag operation. To nobody’s great surprise the rules and format of the inquiry are designed to limit the damage to these parties. We now find that the DES seeks to have its staff on the Commission—this is simply unacceptable. It would make the inquiry into an internal DES inquiry and any report would be open to the charge of "whitewash". The Minister’s defensive performance during the debates on the legislation show that he is sensitive to this charge, and with good reason. His sincerity about the independence of the inquiry was always like the Emperor’s New Clothes, an illusion that relied on the gulag victims’ desperate desire to believe in it.
The illusion was just sustainable in the Commission’s pre-statutory phase but it will not survive the continued presence of DES staff on the Commission. The Minister made it clear that the DES Commission was free to appoint staff of its own choosing, so I must assume it has chosen to retain staff seconded from public bodies including defendant parties. It is obvious that this introduces a conflict of interest and destroys the independence and impartiality of the DES Commission. I say it is obvious—it is as plain as a pikestaff to everyone, except it seems, to the Commissioners and the Minister. Having said that, it is simply incredible that Commissioners have failed to recognise the conflict of interest and its consequences—all this has been mentioned often enough. I make no apology for mentioning it here because of its critical importance and since the efforts of others have failed to register the points with the Commission—not for the want of trying it has to be said. As someone pointed out in a parliamentary debate on this matter: just because the Commission favours retaining DES staff, does not mean it is correct to do so, the Commission is not infallible. Not of course that the Commission itself has ever made such a claim but clearly it can make mistakes.
We are not concerned with whether the Commission’s doorman worked for the DES twenty years ago. We are talking about the Commission’s secretariat whose members will be privy to sensitive information, misuse of which could do untold damage to the Commission or to individuals—defendants or plaintiffs. Nobody’s personal integrity is in question. It is simply that independence and impartiality must not only exist—they must be seen to exist. Any doubt about this has to be removed. I am staggered that this should have to be pointed out to Commissioners—it is to be hoped that this is their first and only mistaken judgement. I am not usually given to teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but then my grandmother could suck eggs with the best. I am no expert on conducting independent inquiries either but I can spot a conflict of interest when I see one, especially one so glaringly obvious and with such potential for harm. I take no credit for sharpness here. This one is the elephant in the drawing room. My surprise is that there should be any doubt about its existence.
If it was not necessary to engage staff from interested parties then it was necessary not to do so, if the DES Commission was to maintain even the appearance of independence and impartiality. I have to tell Commissioners that their decision to appoint staff from the Education Department is a matter of incomprehension and dismay to gulag victims. No satisfactory explanation for this extraordinary decision has been given.
I request an explanation from the Commissioners.
The best Mr Woods could offer, by way of explanation was that replacing DES staff would interrupt the Commission’s work. If this is so, then we must tolerate an interruption to avoid damaging the inquiry’s standing and threatening its success.
The June Statement tells of an internal protocol for avoiding conflicts of interest. Surely, the easiest way to achieve this would be to employ only staff who had no involvement with interested parties—defendant or plaintiff. The Statement is at pains to explain that none of the seconded staff had any involvement with the gulag. This completely misses the point—such assurances would be unnecessary had those staff not been recruited in the first place. The Statement points out that inquiry officers would not be DES staff—but why not? No reason is given, but the implication is that this is to avoid a conflict of interest. Commissioners thus concede that the presence of DES staff can give rise to conflict of interest. Contorted arrangements and justifications fail to address the problem caused by the presence of DES staff. This problem was created by the Commissioners’ decision to engage these staff and has to be solved by reversing this mistaken decision. We all make mistakes, recognising and correcting them does us credit, dogged persistence in mistaken decisions indicates, not decisiveness, but poor judgement.
This is supposed to be an independent and impartial inquiry, there is no place on board for anyone who has an interest to declare. Perhaps too long under the wing of the DES has rendered Commissioners reluctant to demonstrate their independence. But if Commissioners are not to be seen as pawns of the Department they must be prepared to face down Departmental pressure and assert the Commission’s independence. Failure to do this will forfeit the confidence, trust and even the co-operation of the gulag victims.
There is no way of avoiding this issue. The conflict of interest remains so long as the DES staff remain. I can understand that the Commissioners may miss DES staff who served them well in the non-statutory phase and, according to Mr Woods, "did an efficient and effective job". Mr Woods misses the point. The competence of these staff is not in question, their competence or otherwise is irrelevant. I am sure these people are wonderful in all respects—I have no complaints about those I’ve spoken to. The Commissioners’ loyalty to these staff is also understandable and commendable but such sentiment should not be allowed to interfere with the purpose of the Commission. The Commissioners can comfort themselves that nobody will be sacked—seconded staff will simply return to their jobs in the DES where they are desperately needed—for one thing, the records section in Athlone could do with a few efficient and effective staff. Even better—new jobs will be created for unemployed administrators. And we can all get on with something more constructive than gnawing this particular bone.
When Mr Woods was questioned on this, he was careful to downplay the role and importance to the Commission of seconded staff. He said:—
There is concern about possible conflicts of interest because seconded staff belong to Departments which are under investigation. Such conflicts of interest do not arise. In the first instance, the staff concerned will be professional administrators and will be purely administrative staff. They will supply material and will not make decisions.
(3* see footnotes)
Little more than mindless pen-pushers it seems—a gratuitous slur on the abilities of seconded DES staff by the Minister, I’m sure; but it does indicate that they have no particular skills indispensable to the Commission or which could not be found elsewhere. Which forces the question: why are they still there when their presence is causing so many problems and they could so easily be replaced? There must be some reason beyond their value as administrators. I would not like to think there was a hidden agenda but any such nasty suspicions are easily allayed. Commissioners have a choice to make.
Has anybody considered the position of the seconded staff themselves? They are being asked serve two masters. They are expected to owe loyalty to their Department and to the Commission, which will be investigating their Department. They are in an invidious not to say impossible position. They have a conflict of loyalty. They cannot be objective on anything related to their Department. As individuals they should recognise this and resign one of their positions. It is matter of professional honour and personal integrity that an individual having an interest will voluntarily decline a position demanding disinterest. Especially in this case where trust is critically important and the mere suggestion of bias is immensely damaging to a gravely important undertaking. I can only suppose that seconded DES staff themselves have, in their busy schedule, overlooked this point or that nobody has made them aware of it. However, now that it has been pointed out, I expect them—and the Commissioners—to consider it and draw the appropriate conclusions. Attempts to ride two horses at the same time usually end in failure or even disaster.
It seems that for some undisclosed reason the Department and the Commissioners are determined that DES staff will remain on the Commission, whatever offence this causes or however it damages the image and work of the inquiry.
Arguing for the retention of DES staff, Mr Woods told the parliament:—
Even in the case of inquiry officers…these will do no more than record allegations and the response to them…The documents will be given directly to the Commission, which will then carry out the inquiry. The Commission, or its legal representatives will conduct the examination of witnesses. It will weigh up the evidence, reach conclusions and draft its report. It is inconceivable that members of the Commission would allow themselves to be influenced in such matters by administrative staff.
(Mr Woods clearly anticipated that inquiry officers would be DES staff). The suggestion that administrative staff could or would influence those matters had not been made. What had been raised, was the offence to the sensitivities of the victims caused by DES staff working on the Commission—and the Minister failed to address this. When pressed on Commission staffing he gave a bad-tempered and evasive reply. Mr Woods gives the impression that inquiry officers will be mere robots. I do hope this estimate is mistaken as we would all like to be assured of their competence and humanity.
The Minister seems anxious to assure us that DES staff will not dominate the Commissioners and dictate procedures. But nobody ever suggested this would happen. The Commission’s standing is damaged by the mere presence of DES staff. In his attempts to defend the indefensible, the Minister is lashing out in all directions. Perhaps he doth protest too much. The matter is very simple for the Minister and for the Commission—either you want an independent and impartial inquiry or you don’t. Also, it is disingenuous to pretend it is independent and impartial if it patently isn’t. If the Emperor has no clothes then this will be obvious to all. But it has to be recognised that bias or even the perception of bias will render the inquiry worse than useless. Not only will it fail in its declared aims, it will have the potential to cause great damage to all concerned and bring further disgrace upon the country, besides being an expensive waste of everybody’s time.
I want to make this plain: I do not raise questions of personality or personal integrity of Commissioners, officers, or staff—seconded or otherwise. These are separate questions which it is to be hoped do not arise. However, Commissioners should understand that focus on such questions will continue to cause distraction from the work of the DES Commission so long as its independence and impartiality are in question. These distractions are a symptomatic of the dissatisfaction and anger felt by complainants that one of the parties to their injury is allowed to have staff on a supposedly independent Commission. If DES staff can be justified then why not ICB staff? Or perhaps the Commission will employ me in an administrative post. I wonder how that would go down with the defendants? This is not a fatuous but a perfectly logical suggestion. I am an interested party just as is the DES. If employing DES staff does not create a conflict of interest then logically, neither should employing me. I hereby apply for a position.
Independence is important in any inquiry, in this inquiry it is essential. The lives of many people, defendants and plaintiffs, will be affected by the inquiry and by its outcome. All concerned need to be assured that whatever its outcome the inquiry was conducted with complete fairness to all.
It was known from the outset that the inquiry would be dealing with people whose trust in courts and Departments of State was destroyed by childhood experience. The trust of complainants in this inquiry was always going to depend on their perception of it as completely independent of the individuals and agencies responsible for their abuse. Despite the presence of DES staff on the Commission, the Minister and the Commissioners continue to claim its independence. The Commission’s independence and impartiality must be demonstrated and not merely claimed.
We must suppose that the Commissioners have not considered this matter carefully enough and that their decision to retain DES staff does not indicate a cavalier (or even calculated) disregard for the interests, welfare and sensitivities of the victims and is not designed to insult their intelligence.
4 Conflict of Interest—Some Serious Consequences
a) Any conflict of interest, real or merely perceived, may prevent victims participating in the inquiry, thus undermining its operation and indeed its whole purpose. Victims know only too well the track-record of the DES in ignoring, denying and concealing the abuse in the gulag. They know that the DES has mislaid "inconvenient" records about the abuse. They know from bitter experience that the DES is preventing them getting their records. They know that the DES was in large part responsible for the abuse they suffered and is now denying responsibility. They are asked to be open with parties who are attempting to deceive and manipulate them. Because of the personal affront it represents, many victims will be unable to testify while this organisation has staff on the Commission.
b)Evidence given by complainants will be available to DES staff. This will give the DES advance sight of evidence that the complainant may wish to use in any subsequent civil litigation against the DES. This fact alone would prevent many victims from testifying.
c)Conflict of interest and consequent bias will detract from the DES Commission’s credibility and authority. Any suggestion that the DES Commission is less than completely independent and impartial will affect the acceptability of its findings and reduce the authority of its report and recommendations. Remember the Kennedy Report. The Committee was biased in it composition. Many of its recommendations were ignored for 30 years.
This is not an academic inquiry into an impersonal matter, where method and personal factors might be largely irrelevant. The trust of the victims is crucial to the operation and success of this inquiry. The hearings are expected to have a therapeutic purpose for the victims. Therapy depends upon trust. Victims will be unable to participate in an inquiry that they cannot trust. Without victims’ participation, the inquiry will be of limited value. Even if victims do participate, their evidence may be affected by any lack of trust.
Several factors have a bearing on the victim’s trust in the Commission. I have mentioned two: bias (real or perceived) and the question of secrecy. The victims’ trust is so difficult to gain because of their childhood abuse. They are childhood victims of a betrayal of trust and this means that their trust cannot now be taken for granted.Many victims cannot trust anyone or anything. This has been a problem for the victims all their lives. It is now a problem for the Commissioners.
Any victim of childhood abuse suffered a loss of trust. For gulag victims this was compounded by other effects of their gulag experience and the way these handicapped them in adult life. I will describe some aspects of the experience to see how loss of trust arose how it can be handled now—at the inquiry.
Since this inquiry involves the recounting of painful childhood memories, Commissioners will have recognised that the trust of the victims will have to be carefully cultivated. Survivors of child abuse often display a lack of trust in others and a suspicion of their motives. Many were betrayed as children by those who told them "I am doing this for your own good", "I know what is best for you", or "I am acting in your best interests". Any such reassurance we may hear now, even if given in good faith, has a hollow ring. By itself It is not just meaningless, it is suspect. I am very well aware that this tests the patience of others, but it is also difficult for the victim who was unwillingly imprinted with mistrust in childhood. I ask that this mistrust is not taken as intentional rudeness and I apologise if it comes over as such in this submission. It means that words are not enough—good faith must be demonstrated. Mr Ahern and Mr Martin have already betrayed our trust by breaking their promise of openness. This is a very bad start to the inquiry and if the Commission perpetuates the secrecy then it cannot expect to re-establish the trust of the victims.
It seems that plaintiffs are expected to place an unconditional trust in the Commissioners, rather as a penitent does in the Confessor during the Catholic ritual of Confession. But such trust and the supposed therapeutic effect of Confession require blind faith in some metaphysical notion of the Confessor. It would be irrational for plaintiffs to place this kind of trust in the Commissioners. The purpose in victims recounting their experiences is strictly practical—it is part of an investigative process and should not be given any metaphysical significance. Any cathartic or therapeutic effect would be incidental.
Metaphysical entities and notions like blind faith should have no place in this inquiry. All those involved are human. Trust cannot be conjured nor can it be demanded. It will find expression when the necessary conditions are met and it can only be given freely. It is for the Commissioners to devise a setting in which trust can exist. All aspects of the Commission’s untried format have a bearing on this but actions demonstrating openness, transparency and fairness speak louder than words.
Recalling the occasions of abuse can be overwhelmingly distressing and is not done actively without good reason. I think most victims have developed a well-practised habit of forgetting. Spontaneous recall or flashback can trigger debilitating emotional upset until the painful memories are suppressed. The conscious focus required to recount the events in detail is painful and is usually avoided. This may be one reason why silence on abuse is so common. Any outward appearance of resilience hides a slowly evolved strategy to manage the pain so that some semblance of normal life is possible. Victims often claim a mutual recognition through cues imperceptible to others. A delicate structure of mental defences is in place, but the painful memories can be close to the surface and easily activated. Physical survival and the appearance of adjustment does not mean the victim has "survived" abuse unscathed. Through a kind of self-destructive adaptation, the victim may have developed unsuccessful or disabling strategies to manage the pain so that peace of mind is rarely if ever experienced. At best, painful memories are merely kept at bay and recounting them is only to be done for some overriding purpose and in an atmosphere of understanding, security and trust.
Betrayal of innocent trust and bodily violation experienced in childhood usually causes long-term damage. The extent of the damage no doubt depends the nature of the abuse, the age of the child, individual reaction and many other factors. As might be expected, long-range effects and their expression are largely unpredictable and few generalisations are possible. The experience of loss and pain is common but the meaning and significance of this must be unique to the individual. Loss of trust is often experienced after sexual abuse. It is well known that the severity of lasting effects can vary but the abusee’s trust in humanity once badly shaken can be undermined for life. One effect can be that the victim may never completely regain that natural trust in others essential to giving and receiving love and affection. The victim may have a tenuous hold on the kind of generalised trust in his fellow human beings that others take for granted and that makes ordinary social life possible. Trust of any kind in others, let alone unconditional trust, is difficult for the victim of abuse. This is relevant to the Commission’s approach to victims. It is unrealistic and unthinking to place victims in a position where an act of blind faith or trust is expected of them.
The trust of the victim can only be gained if the inquiry process is transparent and merits trust. This cannot be so if there is any hint of bias or if the Commissioners are unwilling or unable to be open with the victim. I implore the Commissioners to give this matter some more thought.
In detention, victims knew little beyond the cruel and highly abnormal world of fear, abuse, brutality and slavery within the gulag. They were deprived of all that is essential to normal physical, emotional and intellectual development. They were deprived of human kindness and the opportunity to develop normal relationships with others. After two years in the gulag, I was a mental and physical wreck. Others spent their whole childhood in this environment; they were completely institutionalised. Victims left the gulag severely handicapped by lack of education, training and life skills. They bore the scars of neglect, maltreatment and abuse. If this wasn’t enough, they wore the stigma of criminality imposed upon them by the courts and therefore attracted hostility and suspicion. Without any support, they had to adjust to the alien world outside the gulag for which they were completely unprepared. They also had to face alone and somehow learn to handle the consequences of abuse they had suffered while their country continued to deny their pain. Having been used and abused in captivity, they then found themselves outcasts in the society that had imprisoned them. Predictably, many failed to adjust. The wonder is that any at all overcame such adversity to take something positive from their appalling experiences.
The full significance of the childhood loss of trust was only realised in maturity. Inability to extend a natural trust to others is a dreadful handicap in life.
After my last sight of Artane and of Ireland, nearly forty years ago, I resolved never to set foot in Ireland again. I have lived in forced exile ever since. To revisit Ireland would have been to revisit the horrors of my childhood—something too painful to consider. I was deprived of my right to affection for my birthplace. I reluctantly visited Ireland for the first time in April last year at the invitation of the police who were inquiring into gulag child abuse. This was a traumatic experience for me. I found Ireland engaged in the archaeology of corruption. The people were preoccupied with the doings of several tribunals inquiring into high-level malpractice. Long buried victims of political murder were being disinterred on desolate hillsides. Ireland was raking over its history and I was part of this history. I was offered sympathy for my troubles but assured that "it couldn’t happen now", however nobody could tell me just why it couldn’t happen now. Something to do with a new affluence and clean streets was mentioned. Blind faith was alive and well. I picked up a newspaper only to read another story of clerical abuse of children in a college at Merchant Quay, Dublin.
Exile cut me off from all contact with my fellow gulag victims and any support this contact might have afforded. I met some of these for the first time in May this year. It was no comfort to learn that so many, like myself, had failed to come to terms with their gulag experiences.
Pain and suffering do not necessarily or even usually elevate. The person who has suffered is not necessarily a ‘nice’ person. It has to be recognised that some victims of childhood abuse, because of their emotional problems, are unpleasant and difficult to get on with. They often show the signs of low self-esteem in pathological shyness, lack of self-confidence and neurotic mannerisms. Unfocussed anger, acute sensitivity, self-obsession, intolerance and suspiciousness can be some of the expressions of the pain and emotional damage. It would be surprising indeed if abuse did not result in such expressions of disturbance in some individuals. I don’t exclude myself—my remarks come mostly from painful personal experience. These personality factors have handicapped victims throughout their lives and still do so. Their struggle to cope was exacerbated by poor education and inarticulacy, which cut them off from sources of help and the means of redress for the wrongs they had suffered.
The victims now have to deal with and confront the powerful bureaucracies, criminal elements and organisations responsible for their childhood abuse. Just as when they were defenceless children, the unholy alliance of the Church and State is ranged against them and is in denial. Because of their disadvantaged backgrounds, many victims are ill-equipped for this challenge. The last time many faced anything similar was in the court that betrayed their trust and committed them to the gulag. Many may feel that they are on trial and will be unable to face the distress of trial by therapy if there is any suggestion that their trust could be betrayed. The Commission should recognise the inequality of advantage and the vulnerability of victims in this process.
Secrecy on the part of the Commissioners will intimidate the victims and frustrate the therapeutic intention of the hearings. By undermining trust it may prevent full disclosure by the victims. If the victims are unwilling or unable to trust the Commissioners they may not be entirely frank and revealing in recounting their experiences. It will be difficult, even in the most favourable environment, and for the most uninhibited and articulate of the victims to talk freely about some of the things that were done to them. If the victim’s freedom of expression is inhibited by unnecessary secrecy and lack of trust this will run against discovering the nature of the abuse. Thus, secrecy and lack of trust will undermine both the therapeutic and investigative functions of the Commission.
(4* see footnotes)
Therapy for the gulag victims has been seen as part of the inquiry process but this idea was never thought out properly. It was always a problematic idea and there seems to be less mention of it now. It could have looked like therapy was being offered as a substitute for truth and justice—an idea that would naturally be badly received by victims. Without an attempt at truth and justice, therapy for the victims is meaningless and insulting. If the concept is broadened to a redemptive process for all parties including the Irish public then it may have significant meaning. Mr Martin has stated that the Commission is similar to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) but was careful to say that there was no proposal to offer amnesty from criminal prosecution. So central was the notion of therapy for the victims that it is reflected in those appointed to the Commission. Membership expertise is skewed towards Social Services, Education, Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry. Apart from your good self, Justice Laffoy, there seems to be no legal or investigative expertise.
The composition of the Commission and the emphasis on "therapeutic" hearings has created the impression that the Commission seeks the causes of the abuse within the minds of the victims. I can’t help feeling that a search for causes within the minds of the abusers and their collaborators would be more fruitful. It should not be the aim of an independent inquiry to reconcile victims with criminal abusers who are still in denial—something implied by the TRC model. Nor could a committee hearing realistically be expected to heal the effects of abuse suffered decades ago. The most therapeutic thing that could be offered is openness, but unfortunately there is precious little of that on offer.
The gulag victims were in greatest need of therapy or indeed any kind of support years ago. Among their many problems in life, perhaps the most difficult to bear was that no one understood their gulag experience and that their country denied it. This is why the mention of therapy now is viewed with disdain or incomprehension by many. Some victims even consider whole notion quite offensive taking the offer to imply that they are mentally ill. The offer could be taken to imply either that their gulag experience unhinged them or that they were imprisoned because of some mental infirmity. Either way, this could be interpreted as suggesting that the victims are mentally unfit as witnesses The expert Commissioners will appreciate that there is plenty of room here for misunderstanding—and not just on the part of the victims. The credibility of witnesses who have attended therapy has been questioned in courts. The victims may have many problems arising from their backgrounds—the stigma of criminality being one—and the last thing they need is another stigma—the stigma of mental illness. In my view, this matter of therapy for the victims ought to have been handled differently. I appreciate that the notion was part of a politically inspired agenda and that the Commissioners have struggled to give it beneficial practical expression. I am grateful to the Commissioners for this.
I might have had a use for some of the undoubted therapeutic skills of the expert Commissioners when I was at Artane and after I left at the age of 15. I was then a mental and physical wreck following two years of unspeakable abuse. I had no one to help me then. I learned as best I could and all by myself how to live with the dreadful consequences of abuse. I was dangerously disturbed and unhappy. I tried every form of self-destructive escapism. I would have given anything for a therapeutic hearing then, but it is too late for that now. Having learned the hard way about survival, victims may have something to offer others in the way of therapy. My concern now is to learn about my personal history and to expose what happened to me and to so many other children, in the hope that this will prevent anything similar ever happening to another child. If we fail to expose what happened, then we cannot expect to learn from these events, and therefore efforts at prevention will be impeded. This discovery of the past and active engagement in improving child protection may be more therapeutic than recounting painful memories.
Since therapy for the victims was to be one of the central functions of the hearings, we might have expected a clear explanation of the concept and how it might be realised. However, nothing like this appears anywhere in the Act or in the DES Commission’s reports. We could be forgiven for thinking that "therapy" was a buzz-word thrown out by a politician desperately in need of answers. The DES Commission and all the parties to the inquiry are now lumbered with the notion that the gulag victims are in need of a cure—a cure that can be delivered by allowing them to recount their childhood traumas to a committee and then attending a course of counselling. It might seem churlish or ungracious (even ungrateful) to criticise this apparently well-intentioned gesture—but I am afraid it may not be all it appears. Victims remember that the notion of therapy was mentioned at the same time as the false promise of Government openness. I will ignore any insult, intended or not and consider the offer in constructive terms. I will also say what a broader concept of therapy might mean in the context of investigating and revealing the horrors of the Irish gulag.
As much as victims may require therapy, other parties may be in greater and more urgent need of it—the DES, the Irish public and the State—to exclude the perpetrators. Therapy for these parties will consist in listening to the accounts of the victims, acknowledging the wrongs done, learning from them and applying the lessons to child protection. The State and the system responsible for the crimes described by victims are in need therapy—or even radical surgery—to remove the elements which gave rise to decades of institutional child abuse and even now allow it to continue. The Irish public needs therapy to cure it of its craven submission to corrupt clerics and their dangerous belief system. The Irish nation needs therapy to help it bear the burden of guilt for turning its back on the gulag children when they cried for help.
But the first step in this therapy will be overcoming inveterate secrecy, self-delusion, denial, amnesia and the old Irish tradition of revising the inconvenient facts of history. There is no room for a romantic and nostalgic history. Holy Ireland was, in all but name a Fascist State disguised by picture postcard images. The real little people of Ireland were not the leprechauns but Ireland’s children who were so badly treated by a State and people obsessed by unhealthy religious beliefs, atavistic political ideology and blood-curdling romantic fantasies. There is an opportunity now to face the unpleasant realities of the past and learn from them. Then something positive may come from the misery of the gulag children. If this opportunity is missed through lack of moral courage, the young people of Ireland will not forgive this generation for imposing an inheritance of unresolved guilt and shame upon them.
The notion that recounting their experiences to a committee will be therapy for the victims is in my view, ill-considered and fanciful. It will be obvious to the experts on the Commission that therapy would be sought in a more favourable environment than before a Government Commission. This could be a stressful environment even for a witness testifying on an entirely impersonal and trivial matter. Indeed the experience may prove highly traumatic for victims. Government action can be more effective as therapy than listening or counselling The most obvious and welcome therapy for many victims would be Government openness with us, exoneration from stigma of criminality imposed upon us by the courts and the implementation of effective child protection measures. But as we know, these are not on offer from the Irish Government. In case it has escaped the attention of the Government and the Commission, many of the gulag victims are extremely angry—not just about what happened to them as children, but about what is happening now. They are not convinced that the Commission is able or willing to report the real history of the Irish gulag. Gulag victims are to retain their criminal status. Little has been done to protect children.
The committee hearings can have therapeutic value if the accounts are used to effect in child protection. Therapy for the victim consists of more than the mere recounting of memories to others. If only it were that simple. This is a common misconception. Recounting memories is not necessarily therapeutic. Therapy for victims of childhood abuse often promotes the notion that the victim must accept and adjust to the past as a fixed reality—painful as this reality may be. However, although the actual events of the abuse in the past cannot be altered, the victim’s view of them can be, and that is important to therapy. Like history in general the content of memories is open to continual reinterpretation. The events consist of memories laid down in immaturity when misconceptions of guilt for the abuse were incorporated. Gulag victims were particularly prone to misconceptions because they were isolated from the real world and were under the total control regime of their abusers.
They were systematically kept in ignorance of themselves and the world. Few understood the appalling circumstances in which they found themselves or how they were being manipulated and exploited. Many were conditioned from infancy to accept virtual sub-human status. Dangerous religious ideas about sin, guilt and suffering as well as deliberate deception encouraged them to feel that they must have been responsible for the abuse in some way.
A clear understanding of what happened can help them reject the sense of guilt and shame. Talking therapy emphasising acceptance offers little relief if it fails to address the victim’s overwhelming need for a correct understanding of abusive events predating sexual and mental maturity when the victim lacked the capacity for correct understanding. Negative self-image, self-blame and self-loathing laid down in immaturity can persist and prove highly resistant to modification by therapy particularly where arrested development is a feature. A detailed understanding of the circumstances of the abuse offers the best hope of relieving the feelings of shame and self-reproach because it can make explicit the victim’s innocence. The therapist in such a case must be prepared to help the victim research his/her personal history.
Many had hoped that this inquiry would reveal how they came to be so appallingly abused and why. The Government and the Commission should understand that the most effective therapy for the victims consists in what is most easily given viz. honesty and openness about the facts of the victim’s personal history. We need all available information on our childhood and the system that so used and abused us. The healing process cannot begin while secrecy continues.
Trust in the therapist is a precondition for therapy, as I have said. Transparency and openness are essential if the process is to have any therapeutic value. The Commissioners should clarify their role. They cannot combine the contradictory roles of censor and therapist. If they insist on acting as censors then they must adopt an inquisitorial role and leave the therapy to others.
The inquiry has to be a two-way learning process if it is to be therapeutic to the victims and to the country. Victims urgently need to discover their past. The country has an urgent need to learn and apply the lessons of the victims’ experiences. If the Commissioners are to be therapists to the victims then they must be prepared to help them discover as much as possible about their past. If they are to act as therapist to the country they must ensure that it learns the lessons of the victims’ accounts. In this view the Commissioners can act as a channel for mutual therapy. If the Commissioners join the defendants in a conspiracy of secrecy against the victims then they will frustrate one of the declared functions of the hearings—therapy for the victims.
I hold the DES and the ICB (Irish Christian Brothers) among others responsible for abuse I suffered as a child. Although the present Government and the ICB have issued apologies, as far as I know, they deny the charges I make and intend to contest them. It seems that the apology issued by the Government does not amount to an acceptance of liability by the State or the DES. Neither does an apology issued by the ICB imply acceptance by that body of any responsibility for the abuse I suffered. These apologies appear to have no meaning or value whatever. Such apologies have about the same value as a concern I might express for the suffering caused by a tidal wave in India—it was very sad and unfortunate but I was not responsible for it and I can do nothing about it. I conclude that these apologies were public relations stunts.
It seems strange that I, a non-Christian, should have to remind professed Catholics that according to their doctrine, repentance means nothing without a willingness to atone. I mention this only because the perpetrators were disguised in the garb of Catholic priests when they engaged in their gross abuse of children. It is fair that those who professed to live by such doctrines should now be judged by them. This may have no relevance in law, but as I will observe later, these priests appear to have received favourable treatment under the law because of their status as priests (or to be more accurate, members of a Roman Catholic Sect).
In announcing the Commission the minister acknowledged its resemblance to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), though he denied any intention to offer immunity. The legislation, (the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse Act, 2000), contains provisions on protecting defendant rights which owe much the TRC model. The emphasis on therapy rather than justice for the victims and on protections rather than justice for the accused is reflected in the Act and in the composition of the Commission.
Enlightened minds recognised long ago that the philosophy and practices favoured by the DES and its religious collaborators were inimical to children and to society—that was regardless of physical and other child abuse in their institutions. Kennedy (1970) accepted that institutions operated by these organisations were simply beyond reform. These parties are unrepentant and appear to have learned nothing from their criminal past. They deny the harm they have done. They therefore still represent a danger to children and to society. This means that there can be no question of forgiveness for them or reconciliation with them. The TRC model is therefore inappropriate.
In any investigation, procedures would have to be devised which respected and protected the rights of the accused and the accusers. Complete independence and impartiality would be essential so that the balance of rights could be ensured. The Commission, has allowed the balance to swing in favour of defendants’ rights and against the rights of the complainants.
The Commission’s June 2000 statement clarifies section 21 of the Act relating to suspension of the defendants’ privilege against self-incrimination. It is plain that defendants’ admissions could affect subsequent court actions. Defendants would refrain from admissions were this not the case. If they deny the charges against them then logically, they should deny them to the Commission and to any court. They will seek to make admissions to the Commission in order to render evidence inadmissible in later actions. If this is used to full advantage it could limit the grounds for later action to a point amounting to virtual immunity. One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to see that.
I am the very first to demand a fair hearing for my abusers. This is more than they gave me, but I insist on their right to legal protections and natural justice when they come to answer the serious charges I make against them. I was falsely accused by the court that committed me to Artane. I spent most of my time at Artane being falsely accused. I was denied natural justice, due process or any consideration of even my most basic human rights as an innocent child, but it is no purpose of mine to seek to deny these rights to others. Perhaps because of my background I cannot tolerate unfairness or injustice to anyone—even to my abusers.
Indeed, I have offered defendant parties the opportunity to come forward and offer me an apology. I have told them that provided they were willing to be completely honest and open with me, I would be prepared to drop all criminal or civil action against them. I have had no constructive response to these offers, and to the best of my knowledge, the parties guilty of abusing me seek to deny this abuse. Given this, the appropriate course would be for the matter to go to court where both they and I would have the protections normally afforded respectively to defendant and plaintiff. I have no problems with a fair court. In such a court I would expect my account to be challenged by the respondents who have chosen to deny the charges I make. Also, in a fair court I would expect to have access to public records held by the defendants. My objection is to a biased hearing in which both the "court" (the DES Commission) and the defendant parties have prevented me seeing all the cards.
It should be remembered that South African model was devised in the aftermath of decades of civil war and Apartheid. All sides acknowledged atrocities—committed, they claimed, for political motives. The amnesties offered by the TRC were part of a difficult political settlement in highly abnormal circumstances and were seen (at least by many) as a price worth paying for social cohesion, economic progress and political stability. Justice was sacrificed in the hope that this would avoid a descent into chaos. There were no comparable circumstances when the mass abuse of children occurred within the Irish gulag. Ireland was not at war—with internal or foreign enemies. Nor would Ireland be threatened with social disintegration should the gulag criminals now face the normal rigours of the law. Identifiable clerics committed malicious atrocities against innocent children in peacetime Ireland. There is simply no excuse for this. The children did not commit equivalent atrocities against their abusers—they are a completely innocent party. The South African analogy therefore breaks down on this count alone.
The "war", if there was a war, was waged against defenceless and vulnerable children by a savage army of misfit clerics who made their own rules and committed their atrocities with malice behind closed doors. They behaved with impunity, whatever excess of cruelty or depravity was involved, because they knew they had the full and unquestioning support of the Irish State. The State neglected its statutory obligation to protect the children and abandoned them to the depredations of the gulag criminals in full knowledge that child slavery and abuse were rife within the gulag. Are we really expected to accept that the perpetrators of these crimes can claim some kind of political immunity? These were crimes and were known to be such by the perpetrators who went to great lengths to protect themselves from the consequences of their crimes.
It seems that the legislators and the DES Commission have tacitly accepted the notion that abuse of a gulag child is somehow to be considered less serious than the abuse of a child in other circumstances. The fact that gulag children were abused en masse in State funded and regulated institutions, is somehow to diminish the seriousness of their individual suffering and the gravity of the offence against them. That a gulag child was abused at public expense and in a political context is being used to justify extending favourable treatment to his abuser. Special pleading is being used because the gulag crimes were committed in an era of social backwardness and general political corruption. As a reward for contributing information on their crimes to the DES Commission by making admissions of minor misdemeanours, the political status of their crimes will be recognised and their evidence will be rendered inadmissible in subsequent criminal or civil proceedings. This it seems was the price "demanded" by the clerics for their attendance before the DES Commission.
This outrageous and odious notion is extremely dangerous as well as being highly offensive and unacceptable. For one thing, everyone knows that the Hierarchy and its clerics bore a large part of the responsibility for the pervasive political corruption and social backwardness of the period. The Catholic Church lived like a blood-sucking parasite upon the Irish people and held them in a culture of ignorance and backwardness through its control of the education system. The State and the clerics seek to spread the blame for the gulag crimes by implicating the long-suffering Irish public (5* see footnotes) as though every adult in Ireland had been a psychopathic paedophile. The Irish public will rightly find this smear both offensive and inexcusable. Should the notion of political immunity from prosecution ever gain acceptance, then a dangerous precedent will be set. Any accused person may "demand" immunity before agreeing to an investigation of their crimes. Other criminals will justly feel aggrieved at their unequal treatment under the law—especially the paedophile who lacked the good sense to commit his monstrous crimes within the gulag while dressed in a frock.
I say that child abuse committed by clerics is more serious than equivalent abuse by opportunist lay criminals outside the gulag. The deference, respect and trust afforded clerics in a predominantly Catholic society was cynically used by the clerics as a cover for their large scale organised abuse of children and is now being used in an outrageous attempt to avoid the consequences of these crimes. The fact that the gulag clerics betrayed the trust of society—not to mention the trust of the children—increases rather than decreases the gravity of their crimes. Now they expect and are to be afforded immunity. No argument can justify this.
Yet, some such argument underlies the treatment to date of the gulag clerics accused of child abuse in Ireland. These clerics have been aware for a long time that they would eventually face criminal charges. More importantly, the Sects and the Church to which they belong have been aware of this. These powerful bodies, having power structures extending to all levels within society and Government, have sought to defend their members through long established methods of influence and pressure. Lets not forget that the Hierarchy largely wrote the State Constitution to favour its operations within the State—including its gulag operations. It is well known that the Education Ministry has by tradition been packed with Church sympathisers and members of Opus Dei. The Church and its Sects have been accustomed for generations to manipulating the political process and the levers of State power to their advantage and we can be confident that they continue to do so (6* see footnotes). In addition, organisations like the Irish Christian Brothers, which hold records on possibly thousands of abused children have been allowed by the State the opportunity to tamper with and even destroy, incriminating evidence which may exist in these records. These records have apparently been, until May 2000, beyond the reach of the law even where there was reason to think that they could contain evidence useable in criminal proceedings.
What this means is that individual Sect members accused of child abuse have received favourable treatment under the law. Any ordinary person accused of child abuse would be subject to entirely different treatment, as any criminal lawyer with experience of prosecuting or defending such cases will confirm. To illustrate, suppose I was accused of child abuse and there was good reason to think my house contained evidence of the crime. Suppose then that the police arrive at my door. Would I be permitted to keep the police waiting outside the door while I disposed of the evidence? Of course I would not, nor should I be, in these circumstances. Yet, the privilege of being allowed tamper with evidence has been extended to Sects whose members are accused of child abuse. We may wonder why this privilege is allowed to these Sects and their members, especially as many of their records were made at public expense and even while Sect members were on the State payroll, e.g. records kept by Christian Brothers who were engaged as teachers at Artane. Thus, as well as the immunity afforded by the DES Commission, these particular criminals, purely because they committed their crimes while disguised in clerical garb and operating under vested powers, are given favourable treatment by the law enforcement authorities of the State.
This favourable treatment of child abusing clerics was to be expected from a State which had for so long been in bed with them. The Church-State gulag system was operated jointly over the decades by Departments of State and a range of bizarre and (supposedly) celibate clerical cults whose unwholesome interest in children was motivated by a desire to exploit them for pecuniary gain and abuse them for deviant sexual gratification. These parties scratched each others backs and had a common interest in maximising the numbers of child slaves incarcerated in the gulag. They now have a mutual interest in defending their gulag operation. Each party defends its own role and denies that mass child abuse took place. These guilty parties must now hang together or they will assuredly hang separately (to borrow a phrase). They cannot risk public recrimination but each has an interest in mitigating its role by incriminating the other. I tell you Justice Laffoy, these guilty parties now seek to exploit your inquiry to their advantage. It is your duty as the leader of an independent inquiry to prevent this. You will have the full support and undying admiration of the public and of course of the gulag victims if you declare and demonstrate the Commission’s will to break its association with these parties. The DES Commission will only damage its credibility and devalue the authority of its findings if it is seen to pander to the overweening conceit and arrogance of corrupt and discredited clerics, politicians and officials.
It is the role of a truly independent and impartial inquiry to conduct its business without fear or favour. The DES Commission ought to have ensured that, as far as the inquiry was concerned, the Departments of State and the clerics had the same rights as any other individual or organisation in similar circumstances—no greater and no lesser rights. I am aware that this may involve matters of fine judgement—but then you are a judge, after all. However, in my view, the DES Commission has blatantly favoured the rights of the clerics and the State—parties already in receipt of favourable treatment.
If the inquiry continues along these lines, we may expect the "rotten apple" excuse to emerge in the Commission’s Report as an explanation of gulag child abuse. Scapegoats will be easy to find. The utterly callous ICB administration will in the end, think nothing of protecting its interests by throwing a few of its own members to the courts as sacrificial offerings. Individual sadists and sadistic pederasts among the ICB are guilty of horrific crimes against children but individual perpetrators were often the rejects and riff-raff of the organisation. They were and are dangerous. However, alone these social and intellectual inadequates would have been a limited menace to children.
Then perhaps the DES will reveal that Turlough McDavitt (Chief Education Inspector of industrial schools in the 1960’s) was a chronic alcoholic and unfit for his post. McDavitt (deceased), we may be told, was incompetent, idle, dissolute and corrupt. We may even learn that he was a paedophile collaborating with fellow paedophiles within the gulag. He can then be blamed for everything that was wrong at the Education Ministry. But wilfully wicked and corrupt as he may have been, McDavitt was only a cog in a corrupt bureaucracy and did not organise the gulag child abuse all by himself.
To become a real danger to children, these delinquents required the co-operation or acquiescence of others. They needed organised corruption and malpractice at all levels of society and across a range of institutions and agencies—the judiciary, the ISPCC, the Gardai, the County Councils, the parish priests, the Hierarchy, and the Government. This is not an unfounded blanket smear on the institutions of Holy Ireland. The claim is readily supported and I have done this elsewhere. The vast gulag operation did not occur by accident but by design. It required raw material (children) and a chain of supply: without these, the gulag would quickly have ground to a halt. A continuous supply of child slaves from the Courts was required. No operation on this scale could exist without its activities and internal workings being known to large numbers of people engaged in the supply chain. I can tell the Commissioners now that any attempt, in the case of Artane, to pin the entire blame on a few delinquent Christian Brothers and an alcoholic Education Inspector will be unacceptable to me and to the public. There is no shortage of blame to share out, but the public will wish to see it apportioned fairly. Otherwise, we may conclude that the inquiry was rigged to a purpose.
The restricted scope of the inquiry and the focus on individual acts of abuse within particular institutions limits its ability to gain an overall view of the Irish gulag. Even had physical and sexual abuse or appalling neglect never occurred within the gulag, the system itself was abusive to children, as experts were well aware. The concentration camps of Europe would have been morally unacceptable and would have been abusive to detainees even without the well-known attendant atrocities. The incarceration of the innocent—especially innocent children, is in itself a gross abuse of human rights. Yet, the Government appears unwilling to recognise this. The focus on specific abusive acts in narrowly defined circumstances avoids the question of why children were incarcerated in such vast numbers in concentration camps and how they came to be there. The public is entitled to a thoroughgoing and comprehensive study of the gulag if only so that people will be able to recognise such a monster should it appear again. The victims are entitled to such a study so that they can come to terms with their painful memories.
The focus on the particular also avoids an examination and explanation of the pathology of the clerical child abuser. If we ask what accounted for the depravity and cruelty of prison guards at Artane, we may be told, "because they were Irish Christian Brothers". Such answers of course beg the question. Some explanation has to be given for the monstrous behaviour that I witnessed and experienced at Artane. I have my own explanations. I lived in intimate contact with dangerous psychopaths, sadists and pederasts and I got to know them very well, but the public and the victims are entitled to a full exposition of the twisted minds and motivations of these people. We need the mind of the sadistic paedophile cleric anatomised and exposed to public view. We need to hear about their dangerous sadomasochistic belief system and how they imposed the same dangerous beliefs upon the children placed at their mercy. In the case of Artane, we need to be told why everybody ignored the dangers of placing vulnerable adolescent boys at the complete mercy of supposedly celibate men with a history of child abuse. We need to hear recommendations on how education and other services dealing with children can be secularised and taken out of the hands of such wicked people. We need to be told why the Education Ministry ignored or dismissed for decades all complaints of child abuse within its gulag.
Without such in-depth investigations we may think that the Commission is involved in another whitewash. We may think that the inquiry was rigged to spare the sensitivities of a discredited Church by neglecting to mention how children were knowingly placed at the mercy of clerics with serious personality disorders.
The problem of the Irish Christian Brothers in particular is not just an Irish problem. Members of this secretive and criminal organisation have been convicted for child abuse in Canada and Australia to name but two countries.
We have a precedent for a rigged inquiry into the Industrial schools. In typically Catholic fashion ("if its not mentioned, it doesn’t exist"), this inquiry covered up the child abuse it found. I refer to the Kennedy Committee established by Minister O’Malley in 1967 and its report in 1970. He was prompted by the latest scandals emerging from the gulag and conscious that Ireland’s appalling human rights record in this regard could hinder Irish entry to the then Common Market. The Minister was concerned to mollify the clerical Managers of gulag institutions. In advance of the inquiry, he wrote to the Managers, assuring them that the purpose of the inquiry was "not to find any fault with the conducting or management of the schools". Nevertheless, O’Malley planned a Committee independent of the DES and other interested Departments. The Lynch Cabinet sabotaged O’Malley’s plans and the Committee as composed had members from the Education, Justice, and Health Departments. More damaging still the manager of Artane as well as other gulag insiders were to sit on the Committee. This really was an "internal" inquiry.
Even with a Committee so ridiculously rigged in its favour, the DES obstructed its investigations. The Department reluctantly disclosed that there had been many complaints of physical abuse over the years but dismissed all these complaints. Nothing new there. The Committee, even rigged as it was, discovered child abuse within the gulag. Minister Martin told us last year that the Committee’s discussion of this abuse is contained in the Committee’s working files. The DES tells us that most of these files have gone missing. How very convenient? But not the first time ‘inconvenient’ files on abuse have been mislaid by the DES. One of the remaining files reveals inter-Departmental recrimination and desperate attempts by Department officials to protect their reputations by covering up the abuse discovered. Instead of putting an immediate stop to the abuse, they sought to avoid "public scandal" by allowing the abuse to continue but concealing it from the public. The Committee’s final Report (1970) makes no mention of the child abuse it discovered within the gulag.
We have here, Justice Laffoy, an object lesson in how not to conduct an independent and impartial inquiry. Kennedy was too closely associated with the parties she was investigating. I don’t think her personal integrity was ever in question but because she was hampered by having to accommodate powerful Departmental and Religious interests, the independence of her inquiry was fatally compromised. Her report, valuable as it was in some respects, lacked authority because it was prevented from taking a comprehensive view of the gulag. It proved to be of little value in preventing child abuse in Irish child-care institutions. Eileen Kennedy appeared to think, as it seems did Donough O’Malley, that urgent abolition of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools was the only way to prevent child abuse in these institutions—the institutions were beyond reform. This apparently desperate remedy—burning the house down to rid it of vermin—was the only option, since it was plain that neither the DES bureaucracy nor the Sects were capable of self-reform, and imposed reforms would be ineffective with such entrenched reactionary interests. In fact, closure of some institutions was already under way and the renaming and reorganisation of the remaining institutions did nothing to eradicate the cancer of child abuse from the system. Another bonfire may be necessary.
Kennedy’s recommendation on abolition would bury for 30 years the appalling abuse of children within the gulag. The gulag children of the time and earlier victims of the gulag paid the price for the lack of moral courage shown by Ministers and by the Committee in failing to address the question of child abuse.
The terms of reference given the Commission by the Government included:—
".. to establish as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of physical and sexual abuse of children in institutions…..including the antecedents, circumstances, factors and context of such abuse…".
This was also included in the Commission’s report on terms of reference of 14 October 1999.
In part, this includes establishing as complete a picture as possible of the antecedents of abuse suffered in an institution. This could, and presumably would, have embraced such antecedents as court decisions committing children to the gulag—perhaps the most significant antecedents. However, reference to antecedents was dropped when the Bill was drafted and does not occur in the Act. At all stages of the Bill’s progress, attempts to reintroduce investigation of the role of the courts into the Commission’s remit were rejected by the Minister. Mr Woods said that because of the constitutional separation of powers he doubted that the parliament could legislate for such a provision.
Rejecting amendments, Mr Woods said:—
I am legally advised that it is constitutionally unacceptable that the Commission should seek to review the decisions of courts in individual cases. I am satisfied, however that the Commission can consider the general system which led to the placing of children in care…. The Bill, as amended by the Dáil, adequately meets the concerns underlying [the] amendments….
It is clear that the DES has back-pedalled on the original intention to examine the role of the courts in supplying children to the Irish gulag. This may have more to do with political expediency and State liability than with any constitutional impediment.
Mr Woods made it clear that a court decision was sacrosanct however mistaken that decision may have been:—
The Commission will not review the decision of the court. It will review the circumstances leading to and following the decision but it will not review the judicial process in making its decision at the time.
Anything that preceded the child’s entry to the court and anything that followed the child’s exit from the court may be examined but not what occurred in the court. The court is to regarded as a child processing machine with a secret and sacrosanct mechanism—the child enters the court legally innocent and emerges a criminal but we are not to inquire about the mechanism that caused this destructive transformation.
I am not alone in finding this idea bizarre and unacceptable.
At just 13 years of age, I was a legally innocent citizen. I was abducted from my home by an elaborate deception. I was assured that I would return to my home after the court hearing. I was kept outside the closed doors of the courtroom during the hearing. I was not charged with anything and I was not tried. I was taken into the courtroom to have the detention order read to me. I had been sentenced in my absence to two years and eight months penal servitude. I was removed from the court and taken to Artane under force as a criminal.
I was abducted by the ISPCC (Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). The ISPCC apparently acted as an unaccountable vigilante police force trawling the country for children to commit to the gulag. Even the Department of Education was concerned about the gulag Managers’ methods of increasing the child prisoner population. A Department file contains...
… the fact that the Managers have an organised ‘touting’ system for children. They have social workers who act as a sort of agent and get children committed to the schools. We have no means of preventing this practice…
(7* see footnotes)
The ISPCC denies having any records of my case. This shadowy organisation seems to have no political regulator or statutory powers and yet it could get its way in any court in the land and have children locked up for years in the gulag. All departments of State I have contacted deny any knowledge of or responsibility for the ISPCC.
My trust was betrayed and I was criminalised for life by process that was kept secret from me. To this day, I have nightmares about what happened behind those closed doors. I think I have a right to know. I demand that the mischief done in that courtroom be examined and revealed to me and declared as wrong. Anything less than this I will interpret as a cover-up.
I think that anything like a "complete picture" will show that the court acted beyond its powers and that the detention order committing me to Artane was illegal. This may be true of hundreds or thousands of other detention orders issued by the courts. If in its examination of the "general system which led to the placing of children in care" the Commission were to reach the same conclusion, could this finding be published in the Commission’s report?
The children’s treatment in the courts was in its own right an act of child abuse. Had thousands of adults been imprisoned without charge or trial then Ireland would have been pilloried by the international community as pariah state. Ireland disguised this mass incarceration of legally innocent children as "child-care". The narrow focus of the Commission’s inquiry will mean that the question of why so many children were in the gulag will not be addressed. This would be like a report on the Nazi concentration camps that reported the atrocities but failed to say why millions of innocent people were in the camps in the first place. All repressive societies practice a form of "social prophylaxis" and Ireland was no different. Myself, and many others in the gulag were political prisoners of the State. We were in the gulag because we were ideologically unacceptable in Holy Ireland. As a non-Catholic, I represented a threat to the State’s ideology. Many other prisoners were in the gulag for socio-economic reasons. Very few were lawbreakers. For instance, of the 413 prisoners at Artane in 1962, only five were in the category "indictable offence", and they were "accepted by the manager on transfer as a concession because of their ages and comparatively mild criminal records". (8* see footnotes) Despite this, the public regarded all those in Artane as criminals. This was because we had been labelled as criminals by the courts. (About 15% of the total were not committed by the courts).
After being criminalised by the court, the process of turning the innocent child into a "criminal" continued. When the child arrived in the gulag, an admission record was completed. According to my record, I had a prison number, I was "charged", "sentenced", and I "absconded". This is the terminology of the criminal law. It was plain that the child was not entering a children’s home, but a prison camp. The child was an imprisoned criminal. A further demonstration of his criminal status was that all his incoming and outgoing mail was censored and anything disapproved of was withheld. I was not in fact charged with any offence, I was not a criminal—I had led a sheltered life, my first contact with crime and criminals was when I met the Irish Christian Brothers in Artane.
An entry in my prison admission record reads:—
With what charged: "Having a parent who does not exercise proper control".
The Commission is required by the Act "to determine the causes, nature, circumstances and extent of..." the child abuse in the institutions. If a child was committed to an institution by a detention order, there is an obvious sense in which the detention order was the cause of all that happened to the child thereafter—including abuse suffered in detention. But the detention order is not merely an antecedent to the abuse, it contributed directly to the abuse—it is one of the major causes of the abuse.
The innocent child in distress attracts sympathy from the normal adult. A criminal whether in distress or not is seen as a threat to society and attracts hostility and resentment. They are seen as agents of their own fate and deserving of any distress that they experience. Once a child was criminalised by the court, everyone’s perception of him/her changed.
The point I am making here is that the court, by criminalising the child rendered him vulnerable to abuse. This relied on how the child was perceived by the prison guards, by officials, by the public and by the child himself/herself.
The detention order criminalised the gulag prisoner. His status as criminal predisposed him to being abused. His prison category (the "charge") indicated to prison guards his degree of vulnerability to abuse. Observers, as opposed to former gulag inmates, often fail to appreciate how such nuances could affect a child’s treatment. The guards, dedicated to a punitive and abusive ethos and largely unsupervised and unaccountable, realised that any maltreatment of these "criminal" inmates would invite no public sympathy or even public attention. Institutional and other factors within the control of the captors could be manipulated to increase the vulnerability of the prisoners. Starvation, malnutrition and consequent poor health quickly reduced the strongest prisoner to a state of lethargy and resignation. The censoring and withholding of mail isolated the child from his family and gave the guards access to confidential and personal information on the child thus undermining his sense of identity.
Criminalisation devalued the child socially and morally. The public was at best indifferent to welfare of such social rejects. These rejects were in need of punishment and reform, not sympathy. The public attitude was that gulag children were in prison because they were criminals or that they must be criminals because they were in prison. They deserved their imprisonment and anything that flowed from it. Since they were criminals, occasional reports of their ill-treatment emerging from the gulag were not a matter for concern. Instead, it was reassuring to learn that those young criminals were not having it too easy. In the public mind, that was as it should be.
Criminalisation affected the child’s self-image and mental stability. The prison environment further degraded the child and reduced his self-worth. The typical gulag child, unable to understand his criminalisation by adult society, internalised the public shaming and developed a debased self-image. The undeserved guilt imposed by the court became part his identity. The stark reality of his imprisonment continually reinforced his criminal status. The debased child was further reduced by a regime of brutality, ritual humiliation, starvation, psychological manipulation and by subjugation to exhausting slave labour. The typical long-term prisoner was physically, intellectually and emotionally stunted. The vacant expression and infantile social responses gave the impression of a child years younger than his age. Lack of education meant that the children were profoundly ignorant of themselves and the beauty of the world.
The physical environment was dilapidated ugly and barren and lacked the sensory and mental stimuli for normal development. Close friendship was discouraged and could invite violence from the priests. Relationships with the opposite sex were completely absent. Many inmates had never known the warmth of love and kindness. Deprivation of love and affection combined with ignorance of their bodies exposed them to emotional and sexual manipulation and exploitation. Sex education consisted of abuse. Self abasement and feigned infantilism were used by the children in their desperate but futile attempts to avoid abuse. Overt mental disturbance was clear in some inmates. Head-rocking, baby talk, speech impediments, thumb-sucking and self-mutilation were common. Another sign of disturbance was bedwetting, to which the priests responded with vicious brutality. On my first day I witnessed a priest beating a child unconscious. Soon after my arrival and before I became the victim of abuse, I experienced a rapid slide into mental instability. As time went by, I began to suffer from spontaneous bouts of crying and uncontrollable trembling, insomnia, nightmares, hypersensitivity to sound, impaired mental focus and depression. These symptoms have remained with me.
Religious indoctrination played an important role in reducing the child’s self esteem, increasing his sense of guilt and removing his psychological defences to abuse. I will explain this briefly for any reader unfamiliar with Catholicism.
Confession (9* see footnotes) was imposed upon the gulag child. This involved going into a dark cubicle (something like a wardrobe) with a priest and revealing ones soul to him. The child was instructed that his sins could be forgiven (or absolved) if he told the priest about them and felt sufficiently guilty. Confession starts with examination of the conscience to discover a suitable list of wrongdoings. At Artane, a boy would kneel in a pew for as long as half an hour examining his guilty conscience for whatever dreadful things he had done. He soon came upon the fact that he was a criminal in the eyes of society and therefore must have been guilty of something. It was important that guilt was experienced—without the experience of authentic guilt, forgiveness could not be obtained.
The cultivation of guilt was aided by contemplating some gruesome image such as a picture of Christ’s flagellation or crucifixion. The child was told that he bore personal blame for these crimes against the innocent Christ. Somehow, his list of sins—swearing, masturbating, whatever—had caused these excesses, however unlikely this seemed. Guilt was only authentic when the necessary mental acrobatics were performed to make this connection. The experience of guilt is at the heart of confession—indeed, it is at the heart of Catholic faith.
Most of the children at Artane had never known anything but being in the hands of religious cults. They were truly "cradle Catholics". A typical gulag victim had been so conditioned that he experienced a generalised guilt. This made it possible for him to believe that he was guilty of almost anything he was accused of and therefore that he deserved any "punishment" he received—even when such "punishment" had no immediate pretext or rationale and was in fact purely sadistic abuse for the gratification of a priest. Thus, the guilt for any assault upon him was transferred from his attacker to himself. He felt guilty when he was abused and he was abused without complaint because he felt guilty. This was the psychological backdrop for casual or ritual physical and sexual abuse at Artane and it explains the apparent acceptance of it by the recipients—something that many people find otherwise inexplicable (10* see footnotes). The gulag children were well versed in the morbid vocabulary of pain, suffering and guilt. The clerical prison guards obsessed by the pathological religious concepts of guilt and bodily mortification encouraged the children to think their own suffering was deserved—whatever or whoever caused it. The sick notion that "suffering is good for the soul" was instilled in the children. They were not to complain about suffering.
In my opinion, this cultivation of guilt was profoundly damaging to a child’s mental integrity and self-esteem. It reinforced the child’s criminality. It also promoted a state of mind conducive to child abuse. So commonplace is the act of Confession, this aspect of it is seldom discussed by adherents.
Many claim to be mystified how the mass abuse of children in the Irish gulag could occur while for decades the public showed no concern and now appears to be amnesiac. A key factor was the stigma of criminality imposed by the courts. Stigmatise, incarcerate, abuse. Nuremberg Laws, concentration camps, Holocaust—the pattern is common even if the events are not analogous in degree or consequence. The perception of them as criminals and deserving of punishment together with their own degraded self-image meant that gulag prisoners could be abused without complaint and without exciting public concern. The public could ignore with an easy conscience the plight of social rejects. When these debased children were made the defenceless captives of sadistic paedophile clerics, their vulnerability meant they could be abused with impunity. That was inevitable and predictable. The claim that nobody saw the dangers of placing vulnerable adolescent boys at the complete mercy of such sexual misfits is frankly incredible. That Department inspectors failed to act on persistent complaints is unforgivable. Denial and amnesia are the last refuge for the public, the Department and the courts now unable to accept the unsupportable burden of shared guilt for complicity in the monstrous abuse of the gulag children.
Some people may be horrified to realise that legally innocent children could be held prisoner for years. They may be surprised to learn that very few of the gulag prisoners were lawbreakers. Had the public been aware of this, its attitude to the gulag prisoners and to their ill-treatment may well have been have been different.
Many of the gulag children, like myself, had a charge against them invented by the court. The charge was not read to them. Without a trial or a hearing of any kind, they were held to be guilty of this offence and the kangaroo court sentenced them to years of penal servitude in the gulag. The public may find this incredible, but as you and I know, Justice Laffoy, this is exactly what happened. Members of the public will want to know the details of how and why this was done. If the Commission won’t tell them, then someone else will have to.
What the courts did to these children was unthinkably wicked, monstrously unjust and it was illegal. The children’s criminalisation led inexorably to the physical and sexual abuse they suffered. Now it seems they are to bear the stigma of criminality for the rest of their lives. When members of the public learn about the appalling behaviour of the courts, they will understand why every attempt is being made to cover it up. It is so shameful that no one in Government dares to have it raised. The role of the courts as the supplier of child slaves to the vast gulag operation is to be hidden from the public because, we are told, it would be "constitutionally unacceptable" to examine it. The Government and the Commission know that courts criminalised thousands of innocent children yet no one can be found with the courage to admit that this crime occurred, let alone accept responsibility for it. I say it is morally unacceptable for the Government and the Commission to attempt to bury this State crime by obfuscation and dishonesty. The Government has set the Commission to apportion blame for narrowly defined acts of child abuse within the gulag while a gross abuse of the human rights of a far greater number of children is to be ignored.
Minister Woods tells us that it would be "constitutionally unacceptable" to review court decisions in individual cases. He did not elaborate. Did he mean it would be difficult or too expensive or too embarrassing or impossible? Can you please tell me what the Minister meant by this?
If it is constitutionally unacceptable to review a court decision that amounted to a gross injustice against an innocent child, then the constitution requires urgent amendment. In any case, I dispute the Minister’s opinion. In my view, one of the functions of the inquiry should be to determine whether individuals suffered injustice in the courts—quite apart from any injury they may have suffered subsequently. Excluding from consideration matters which the gulag victim rightly considers an integral part of the injury they suffered is both unjust and irrational. This decision will not engender trust in the DES Commission. I have a copy of the detention order that sentenced me to two years and eight months in prison. I challenge the legality of that document and the court procedure by which it was issued. That order criminalised me and led directly to the abuse I suffered at Artane.
The Government and the Commission have given much attention to guaranteeing the constitutional rights of the abusers and ensuring natural justice for them—I don’t object to this, indeed I would insist on it. However, gulag victims, as innocent children, were denied their constitutional rights and natural justice by the courts. Neither the Government nor the Commission has given any attention to these injustices or to how they can be redressed. It seems that the rights of gulag victims are not worth the attention given to the rights of their abusers. Am I expected to overlook this gross inequality of regard? Clearly, some are to be regarded as "more equal than others" under the law. Perhaps my rights would merit more attention were I to drag up in clerical robes?
Much of the injury suffered by gulag victims is by its nature irreversible. However, the injury done by the courts can to some extent be reversed or at least ameliorated. The State can acknowledge the wrong done to individuals by the courts and thereby remove from these people the stigma of criminality. This stigma has continuing detrimental effects on the lives of victims, for instance, it hinders access to employment, and it continues to undermine the victim’s self esteem (11* see footnotes). If it can be established that a person suffered an injustice in a court as a legally innocent child, then why on earth can this not be acknowledged by the State? I reject the notion that it can’t be done, I know it can be done and I insist that it must be done. Why should a gulag victim bear forever the shame imposed upon them unjustly by the State?
What is required is that the State issue to that person a "certificate" of some kind confirming that they were wrongly criminalised by the court. This is a simple and cost-free means of demonstrating to victims the sincerity of the State’s apology. Besides its practical and therapeutic benefits, this measure would have immense symbolic value in promoting reconciliation. Neither the payment of damages nor the offer of counselling can substitute for this simple measure. A sincere apology demands restitution where possible. If the State is unwilling to implement this simple, limited and belated measure of restitution, then its apology will be seen as insincere and meaningless. This will undermine trust in all other measures announced including the establishment of the Commission.
The history of the Irish gulag is important to gulag victims and to everyone in Ireland. We need to learn lessons from it. But discovering this history may be difficult because powerful religious and political interests are determined bury it forever. Honesty will be required to face some very unpleasant facts. The fact that Ireland’s theocracy operated child concentration camps will not go down well in some quarters. Details of the sexual abuse of children by clerics is not something anyone wants to read about over their cornflakes—least of all Irish Catholics given to sweeping unpleasant facts under the carpet. There is a danger that today’s public will accept revisionist history or indeed a complete denial of the gulag. A precedent here is the Irish Civil war. As a young child in Ireland I recall that this was a taboo subject thirty years after the war had ended. To the best of my knowledge, no comprehensive history of the Civil War period has ever been published. Paranoia and guilt generated a national amnesia. The residents neighbouring the German death camps developed similar denial and amnesia, as I discovered on visits to the sites of Buchenwald and Dachau less than twenty years after their final closure.
It was to be expected that the guilty parties who operated the Irish gulag would try to cover their guilt by concealing records from victims and the public. History is being written with the nasty bits taken out. We need a full picture, warts and all.
Artane closed over thirty years ago and the records I have requested are nearly forty years old. Still according to the ICB, I cannot be shown records on its policy and administration of Artane. According to the DES, it would be "contrary to the public interest" for me to be shown any record relating to the operation or administration of Artane. We might be forgiven for thinking that Artane was not a "school", but a Top Secret Government project engaged in unacceptable and inhuman methods of social engineering and that revealing its secrets even now, would cause public alarm and disquiet—a perception closer to the truth than many may dare to think.
Members of the public may well wonder what the State and Church are so determined to hide. We must remind ourselves just what is being hidden from the gulag victims and from the wider public. Ostensibly the information relates to the operation, administration and supervision of schools and children’s homes in Ireland forty years ago and more. We might expect these dusty files to contain a great deal of anodyne detail of interest only to specialist historians or researchers. However, whatever the content of these records, it has so terrified and alarmed the State that it is making determined efforts to deny, into the indefinite future and perhaps forever, public access to such records.
I can tell the public that this secrecy has nothing to do with protecting the public interest. It has to do with limiting the liability for the diabolical neglect and maltreatment of children by State organs and those in whom they vested powers. It is being used to restrict the right to legal redress of the childhood victims of this abuse. Despite Minister Martin’s words last year about a need for "every