Publishing industrial school reports will prove what cover-ups there were

If Br Garvey is trying to ensure that civil servants share the blame, he is right. They should, but this only proves that none of them were fit to have responsibility for children

The Christian Brothers were reportedly “shocked and dismayed” at the decision of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin to publish a 1962 report into conditions for 450 boys at Artane Industrial School. Fr Henry Moore, the school chaplain, drew up the report at the request of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid.

Christian Brothers communications director Edmund Garvey says Dr Martin’s behaviour prejudices the position of the Christian Brothers in the eyes of the public. According to Br Garvey, “The Christian Brothers consider it unconscionable” the Archbishop published the document without notifying them first.

It is a pity some of Br Garvey’s colleagues were not prepared to criticise some of Dr Martin’s predecessors when they should have been criticised. In a sense, it is almost poetic to hear a spokesman for the Christian Brothers squealing about injustice when they trampled on the concept of justice for so long.

There is compelling and conclusive evidence that boys were physically and sexually abused by Christian Brothers throughout the country. When some parents had the guts to complain, the offending Brothers were transferred into industrial schools, such as Artane, where they were free to engage their perverted and sadistic whims on the most vulnerable of boys.

People say times were different then, but that is just a cop-out. If the superiors who sent those deviant Christian Brothers into the industrial schools did not realise they were behaving in an irresponsible, dangerous and even criminal way, then they were unfit for any position of responsibility.

They not only betrayed the children; they betrayed the fundamentals of Christianity. They also betrayed the idealism of the decent men who joined the Christian Brothers in a spirit of vocation. I went to primary and secondary schools run by Christian Brothers and, in those 12 years, with just a couple of exceptions, all were decent men.

But the boys in the industrial schools were incarcerated with the dregs and misfits of the order. Some of those Christian Brothers were violent sociopaths who belonged in jail, and others were complicit in their crimes through their gutless silence. And it was all in the name of God.!

Br Garvey wants some other reports published because they supposedly balance the report of Fr Moore, who was convicted of paedophile offences in the 1990s. Those reports, conducted under the aegis of the Education Department, should be published, even if they are whitewashes.

The Education Department is as much to blame as the Christian Brothers. “The State had chosen to take the children from their natural guardians and had handed them to the care of someone else and so had a responsibility to ensure they were cared for properly,” department secretary-general Brigid McManus admitted to an inquiry. In 1955, one of her predecessors visited Daingean Industrial School, and found that “the cows are better fed than the boys”, but nothing was done about this for 16 years.

McManus “freely acknowledged the inspectorate system was inadequately implemented” and did not even “meet the minimum requirements” of the Children’s Act of 1908. But the department hid behind a 1962 inspection which concluded there was “no basis” for Fr Moore’s complaints of abuse at Artane.

Who will be so gullible as to believe those whitewash reports now? If Br Garvey is trying to ensure that civil servants share the blame, he is right. They should, but this only proves that none of them were fit to have responsibility for children.

Nobody is any longer likely to be surprised at such irresponsible behaviour in the light of the disclosures of sexual and physical abuses highlighted over the past decade and a half. Children were taken from parents and placed in institutions like Artane, Baltimore, Daingean, Glin and Tralee, where they were physically and sexually abused.

The bishops even called for more children to be placed in those institutions — not in the interests of the children but so those running the institutions could get more money from the State. This money was obtained under false pretences, because the children were not fed, clothed or educated properly.

“The boys’ clothing is uncomfortable, unhygienic and of a displeasing sameness,” Fr Moore wrote. “They are constantly dirty, both themselves and their clothes. Overcoats are not supplied except where a boy can pay £3 to £4 in advance, which must come from his own pocket. It is pathetic to observe hundreds of boys walking the roads of the district on Sunday mornings, even in deep winter, without overcoats.”

Once a week the boys got a change of socks and shirts, and a change of underwear once a fortnight. Discipline at the school was “rigid and severe and frequently approaches pure regimentation”, Fr Moore continued. “There seems to be no proportion between punishment and offence. In my presence a boy was severely beaten on the face for an insignificant misdemeanour.

“Recently, a boy was punished so excessively and for so long a period that he broke away from the Brother and came to my house a mile away for assistance. The time was 10.45pm, almost two hours after the boys retired to bed. For coming to me in those circumstances he was again punished with equal severity. Some time ago, a hurley stick was used to inflict punishment on a small boy. The offence was negligible.”

Maybe the abuse that occurred in the industrial schools can be attributed to misfits within the Christian Brothers but the most blistering indictment of all was that an order which was supposedly dedicated to teaching did not even provide a proper education for its charges.

Many were not even given the most basic education, which would allow them to read or write properly. They were supposed to be taught a trade from the age of 14, but Fr Moore noted that only 12 of the 150 boys of that age were eligible for the vocational school examination and only five out of 18 who took the exam in 1961 were successful. “In view of the requirements of technical education, the situation in Artane is obsolete,” Fr Moore wrote. “There seems to be no effort to train the boys satisfactorily at their trades.”

In the early years of the new State, there was phenomenal amount of idealism in this country. A study by an Irish priest in the Vatican revealed there were at least 3,306 Irish missionaries abroad in 1939, a 65% increase on the number in 1933. The numbers continued to rise in the 1940s and early 1950s. They were a veritable army of idealistic women and men with vocations to serve humanity.

Most — some 70% — were nuns butthe Christian Brothers had 180 missionaries, more than the priests from any single order. The misfits disgraced themselves in Canada and Australia; the others betrayed their idealism by their silence.

If the British had done this, we would never hear the end of it — but our civil and church authorities were responsible. Rather than face reality, we covered up their reprehensible behaviour for decades.

Let us have all the documents to lance this boil once and for all because it is a blight on the idealism on which our independence was supposedly founded.