Out in the cold – the very people it was all about

THE exclusion of institutional abuse victims from the Ryan Commission’s press conference, and the use of gardaí to expel them, served as a stark reminder that Ireland has yet to accept the implications of that horrific legacy.

The sight of those innocent men and women standing in the rain outside the hotel while the state’s representatives briefed media inside was shameful and revolting.

These were not just uninvited guests who turned up announced. They were victims of a crime against humanity in which that same state colluded. They had more right to be there than anyone else.

And the tense choreography of their expulsion from the briefing had disturbing echoes of the past. Because when boys escaped from industrial schools, the gardaí were also called in… to recapture them and return the terrified children or teenagers to what we now accept were hellholes of physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

And when the “Magdalene’s” were allowed out to parade on religious holidays, heavy garda escorts flanked them along the route.

The tortures and horrors visited on inmates of the institutions bear comparison to life under the Nazi regime… one victim was forced to lick the excrement off a “carer’s” boots. The tortures took many forms, physical, emotional and sexual. And to think that the names of the abusers are to be protected.

It’s a bit like as if the post-war governments of Europe had decided that what the Nazis did was awful but then asked survivors of the camps to accept the perpetrators would not only be allowed to go free but their identities would also be kept secret.

The Ryan Commission proposes a memorial to victims. Why not preserve the former industrial schools in the way that Dachau concentration camp is in Germany as memorials to a shameful and terrible past?

Come to think of it, perhaps Eamon de Valera’s expression of condolences on the death of Hitler wasn’t all that inapt after all. Sure didn’t we have our own virtual SS and our own Hibernian gulags?

Even as our Taoiseach was meeting the German ambassador in May 1945, thousands of children dwelt in fear of a Nazi-like regime in Catholic Ireland… the land of Saints and Scholars.

We’ve had many a ballad composed and sung about the cruelty of the Black and Tans and the perfidy of the Redcoats and other figures of hate or oppression or political tyranny who assailed the Irish.

But of the evil that flourished in the industrial schools we heard not a whisper until recent times. What a cover-up, and not just by religious orders or those in the corridors of power. We were a nation in denial and now the shattering truth is staring us in the face.

John Fitzgerald

Lr Coyne Street

Callan

Co Kilkenny