Ahern apology on behalf of State to abuse victims ‘momentous’

TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern’s apology, on behalf of the State, to people abused as children in institutions “was a momentous step - something unbelievable for all of us,” former Artane Boys’ School inmate Mick Waters told the Child Abuse Commission yesterday.

“It was a great feeling to have a leader of a country stand up and turn around and give that apology. It was something that was never done before and I don’t know that it will ever be done again.

“But for the Taoiseach to stand up and issue that apology was a momentous step. It was just something unbelievable. Who would ever have thought, in the early days when we were putting in the work, we would have had a day as good as that day? Again, that gave people hope, that encouraged people and many of them, who were very old or ill could turn and say ‘we’re being believed,’” said Mr Waters.

Mr Ahern’s apology was very well received by the vast majority of survivors. “It was like a whole new world opened up to us. It was like being in the darkness and then all of a sudden you walk out of this wood and there’s the sunshine.

“You’ve arrived at a time when you’re now being believed and an apology issued. That itself was fantastic, to know we were being believed,” said Mr Waters. Describing the pace of events after revelations of child abuse in the institutions became public - and Mr Ahern’s apology on May 11, 1999 - as beyond belief, Mr Waters said they had written to many people in Dáil Éireann and people in other organisations.

When word got out that something was happening “mainstream” in Ireland to address what happened to them as children in institutions, survivors of child abuse were shocked and numbed that something was actually being done, said Coventry-based Mr Waters, co-ordinator of SOCA UK.

He described how a committee of SOCA, the survivors of child abuse organisation, was set up in London on June 19, 1999 as a support group after people got in touch with him following the revelations. Its constitution was drawn up later that month.

Mr Waters traced the organisation’s development from a case against Christian Brothers reported by the Irish media in the 1990s and picked up by British papers.

It wasn’t possible to get a job at home, once you put down you were educated at CBS Artane Dublin. They felt stigmatised, outcasts, and not wanted in Ireland.

In London he and two or three other people who also had been in Artane, though not at the same time, used to meet socially since about 1965 and talk about the school and their time there. Most would talk about the beatings, the general neglect and the things that children were forced to go through. All the time the big question was why were these things allowed to happen.

Michael O’Brien, Right to Peace survivors group, described how he and 12 other former inmates of Ferryhouse, run by the Rosminians outside Clonmel, Co Tipperary, formed a group to see what they could do about the sexual, physical and verbal abuse they suffered in an institution meant to care for them. They never got an apology from those that abused them, said Mr O’Brien, his voice rising with emotion. To get an apology was their main aim. “An apology is of the utmost importance.”

He said: “I still wake up in the middle of the night with fear of people standing by the end of the bed, waiting to take you away. I hope the commission would finish in two or three years. If you drag it out it brings the whole thing back.”