Abusive Schools in Ireland Gerry OShea
Gabriel
Byrne’s Broadway play Walking with Ghosts deals with the actor’s life
growing up in Dublin as the eldest of six children in a working-class family.
It is a dramatic memoir of his young years, dealing impressively with his early
school and church experiences before moving on to heartbreaking family tragedies
and his own successful battle with alcoholism.
At age
eleven, in the early 1960’s, he was recruited as a likely candidate for the
Catholic priesthood by some order with a preparatory junior seminary in
England. There, he liked studying Latin and was lauded by his teacher as a
possible future classical scholar.
In one of
the high points of the play, the Latin teacher invited him to his room for a
chat. The priest questioned him about his sexual propensities while grooming
him for grotesque sexual molestation which occurred on that day.
In a
poignant scene from a later point in his life, Byrne speaks on the phone with
the aging priest-molester. He asks him if he remembers the Irish boy that he
called his best Latin student. Predictably, the priest reverted to empty
apologetic talk about age and forgetfulness. Many in the theatre audience felt
that Gabriel would cut loose and lambast him for his scurrilous actions against
him as a boy, but he explained that in talking to the priest, the old feelings of
powerlessness and humiliation returned. Yelling at his tormentor would not ease
the psychic sting of diminishment that is still embedded in his memory. So, he
said a weak goodbye and hung up.
In the year
2000 the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was established by the Dublin
Government to investigate the abuse of children in State institutions. The
conclusion of that report, released in May 2009, asserted that starting back in
the 1940’s, many children in these industrial “schools” were subjected to
systematic and sustained physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
These
institutions were run by religious orders where the predators were protected by
their religious superiors. The buildings, scattered throughout Ireland, were
cauldrons of vice and misery where children were regularly heard at night
crying out in pain and terror.
The
equivalent treatment was meted out to girls in the hated and disreputable
Magdalene Laundries where allegedly troubled girls were disrespected and
diminished, although with far less use of sexual degradation.
These places
proclaim a serious negative commentary on the culture that tolerated this awful
behavior. What did these brothers and priests and nuns learn in their mandated
novitiate years when they were engaged in studying the Christian approach to the
great moral issues? Respect for others is a cornerstone of the Judaeo-Christian
belief system. “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren that you do unto
me” looms large in Christ’s teaching.
Where were
the learned theologians or even the bishops with a sacred mandate to care for
the poor? What were they engaged with that was more important than responding
to the nocturnal lamentations of the children? Surely a few of them or some
conscientious priests could have raised a cry about the plight of the poor kids
who had nobody to speak for them.
Irish
psychologist Marie Keenan argues that abusive priests and brothers are not
isolated monsters but must be seen as products of a system of human and
psychological formation that fixated them at an adolescent level of sexual
development.
In a 1946
trip to his native Ireland, Fr. Edward Flanagan of Boys Town fame toured some
of these so-called reform schools and named them a “scandal, un-Christlike and
wrong.” He described them as “a disgrace to the nation.”
Minister for
Justice Gerald Boland dismissed his concerns in a harsh statement in the Dail
saying that “he was not disposed to take any notice of what Flanagan said.”
There is no indication that Fr. Flanagan’s serious concerns even reached the
agenda of a bishops’ meeting in Maynooth.
Sociologists
point to the deep class structure of Irish society as their perspective on the
source of the widespread abuse. The kids at the bottom of the economic pecking
order had nobody on their side. Their families had no power. The wider Irish
society mostly looked down on the people at the poorest end. Somehow their
misfortune was deemed their own fault.
There were
industrial schools in Northern Ireland but the kids fared a little better there
because the British school inspectorate demanded some humane standards in the
treatment of the boys. The Department of Education inspectors in the South
showed no sensitivity to the plight of the youngsters.
Recent
reports from elite fee-paying Irish schools reveal that the children of the
well-to-do were not exempt from clerical predators all over Ireland.
Blackrock
College, a high school for the privileged where the Holy Ghost Fathers (now
called the Spiritans) ruled, qualifies as a den of iniquity. The reputation of
this college and the other eight fee-paying schools that this disgraced order owns
is now consigned to a dark corner of Irish life.
Over three
hundred boys, former students, have registered as victims of abuse in Spiritan
schools, and so far they have paid out over 5.7 million euros in settlements to
damaged adults. Fr. Kelly, the current Spiritan provincial, was asked if there
was a pedophile ring of priests operating out of Blackrock College in the
1970’s. He responded that he couldn’t say for sure one way or the other.
The reason
that this child abuse issue has re-emerged in Ireland in the last month centers
on a radio program where two brothers, Mark and David Ryan, told of their
repeated abuse by a number of priests when they attended Blackrock and its
feeder school Willow Park. The Spiritans apologized and confessed that they had
credible reports from over 240
past-pupils from their schools claiming sexual abuse when they were in their
care.
Within a few
days of the radio program sixty more allegations of Spiritan abuse emerged and
the Sexual Crime Management Unit of the Gardai registered six new complaints during
the first week.
People asked
about the other spiritual keepers of exclusive fee-paying schools and the
following information was released. The Jesuits famous for their elitist colleges,
Belvedere in Dublin, Clongowes Wood in Kildare and Crescent College in Limerick,
admitted 149 allegations against 43 of their members. They have parted with 7.4
million euros in compensation at this time.
Vincentians
who own the exclusive Castleknock College, have heard from 45 past pupils
alleging abuse and, so far, have paid out 1.4 million. The Franciscans are
dealing with 124 allegations of sexual abuse by their friars and they have
spent 3.8 million in settlements. The number for Dominicans comes to 97 complainants
– and so on.
People are
asking what these orders were doing devoting their talents to schooling the
affluent in Irish society. How does this square with biblical principles?
Hannah
Arendt wrote a famous book in 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem, about the
Eichmann trial in which she coined the expression “the banality of evil” to
explain his actions which were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands
of Jews and gypsies in the Nazi death camps. She accepted that his behavior was
not primarily driven by malice or even by antisemitism but showed a sorry
personal disengagement from the reality of the evil acts he performed.
Does a
similar banality at least partly explain the actions of those abusing clerics
who completely abandoned their sense of right and wrong?
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