Saturday, March 06, 2010
DESPITE the corrupting secrecy that does so much to block the advance of our social, political, economic, educational and legal development, we have been exposed to a litany of horrors over the last few years.
Our recent history has been defined by one scandal after another.
We’ve had the Ferns, Murphy and Ryan reports into a corrupt Catholic Church and the medieval cruelties of some institutions and paedophile clerics.
The sentencing yesterday of Fr Ronald Bennett, the former spiritual director of Gormanston College, for child abuse, was just the latest episode in this tragedy.
Reckless and greedy bankers and developers have been uncovered and their uncontrolled behaviour has damaged this country’s prospects for decades to come.
We’ve seen how the weakest have paid with their lives because social services, sometimes for valid reasons, could not offer those troubled souls the hope of a better tomorrow.
The report into the 2007 deaths of Adrian and Ciara Dunne, and their daughters Leanne and Shania, showed our reflex-action secrecy at its very worst.
The Monageer Report was so heavily censored as to make it almost irrelevant. Pages and pages were defaced, obliterating 13 of the 30 conclusions and seven of the 21 recommendations. Children’s Minister Barry Andrews described this, with Stalinesque detachment, as "a redaction". It was a cover-up.
Just this week, Mr Andrews strongly criticised the release of the Tracey Fay report. His criticisms were supported by the HSE, which insisted that "protocols" precluded publication of the damming report eight years after Tracey’s death. It is impossible to believe anything other than that the HSE was hiding behind "protocols" to suppress a report that showed welfare and health services in a very, very poor light.
It was another attempt at a cover-up and it might have succeeded only for Deputy Alan Shatter’s commendable determination and conscience.
Reports into the deaths of up to 20 other young people who died while in the care of the state, since 2002, are awaited. Eventually delay becomes secrecy.
It is not necessary to dig very deep to sustain this argument because just yesterday, a man was sentenced to 14 years in prison for the sexual abuse of his eldest son over three years. The man pleaded not guilty to 47 counts of rape and sexual assault on his son, when the boy was aged between 12 and 15 years old. His wife is serving a seven-year sentence for incest with a son and the neglect of all six children.
This family first came to the notice of social services two decades ago but despite that the children endured years of neglect and abuse. One of their sons has said he hoped the publication of a report into the HSE’s handling of the case would help other children. Let us hope it is neither redacted nor delayed by protocol.
We should not forget the Flood and McCracken and Moriarty tribunals into the murky links between business and politics either. Each of these scandals has provoked outrage but not enough to prevent a recurrence.
When you consider even a few of the scandals together, it reveals symptoms of something far deeper and darker than we have yet to acknowledge. These scandals could only happen in a society that turns a blind eye to criminal and evil behaviour far too readily.
We can blame all the institutions we like — political parties, the Church and the HSE — but because we, as individuals and collectively, tolerate the death of Tracey Fay, the Dunne family tragedy, the Roscommon horrors, all the Fr Bennetts, as well as all the scandals in other spheres, they will recur time and time again.
We will never make a perfect world but surely we can do better than this? A first step would be ending the secrecy that facilitates these destructive scandals.
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