'They feel badly let down': Institutional abuse survivors grow old waiting for the State to act

Many survivors of institutional abuse remain deeply critical of the State, in particular the Caranua agency, and fear obligations are stalling, writes Mick Clifford

A memorial plaque to victims of the Magdalene Laundries in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Picture: Julien Behal/PA Wire

There were just a handful of TDs in the Dáil chamber when proceeding opened soon after 9am on January 25 last. 

Sinn Féin education spokesperson Donnacha Ó Laoghaire stood to ask the Education Minister Norma Foley about the plight of survivors of institutional abuse. 

With each passing year, there are fewer survivors. Many have reached the end of their natural lifespan, which is often shorter than average life expectancy due to the effects of their early years in sometimes brutal circumstances.

Ó Laoghaire wanted to know where things now stand. Following the publication of the Ryan report, an agency called Caranua had been set up to cater to the needs of survivors. That had been wound up in 2020 and a new process set up to deal with outstanding issues.

“A group of survivors met with a group of facilitators appointed by the minister’s department late in 2019 and came up with a number of recommendations,” Ó Laoghaire said. 

“Those recommendations centred around fundamental things such as enhanced medical care or an enhanced medical card, housing entitlements, or a pension, as was the case with the survivors of the Magdalene institutions. 

"Those proposals were submitted in late 2019, which is now more than three years ago. I understand there was one further meeting in late 2020 which the minister was part of, but there has been nothing since. They feel badly let down. They feel they are in the dark.” 

The minister responded that a forum set up as a result of those meetings had compiled a report. 

“The final report of the forum was submitted to the department last year,” Foley said.

Sorry, Ó Laoghaire came back. That wasn’t last year. It was the year before.

“I will not lead the deputy astray regarding the date,” the minister reported. 

“I will check it and get back to the deputy today with the information.” 

Education Minister Norma Foley was unaware of the date of the publication of a report detailing recommendations on supporting survivors of institutional abuse. Picture: Gareth Chaney/ Collins 

It turned out that the Sinn Féin spokesperson was correct. The final report had been submitted in 2021.

The exchange is notable, as the subject matter is a group of elderly people, many of whom have been unable to get past the trauma inflicted on them as children. Some are struggling through their winter years with various financial and medical issues. 

They had been led to believe the State considered itself responsible to some extent for their plight and that special arrangements would be made to ease them through the latter stages of life. Time, quite obviously, is precious for them. 

Yet the minister was telling the Dáil a report outlining how best to respond to their needs had been gathering dust for over a year. That the minister was apparently unaware of this herself also spoke volumes.

Ryan report

It was all so different in 2009 on publication of the Ryan report. The report outlined the extent of physical, sexual and emotional abuse suffered by children in institutions run by various agencies of the Catholic Church, but funded and inspected by the State. 

Over 1,000 men and women reported abuse to the commission in 200 different residential settings between 1914 and 2000. This happened in industrial schools, children’s homes, schools, day centres, and foster care settings as well as Magdalene laundries. 

The report found the State had a “deferential and submissive attitude” towards the religious congregations that ran the institutions.

Shock at what had been perpetrated was the reaction throughout society and abroad. A deep sense of shame that this was allowed to occur was also felt. In the Dáil, then-opposition leader and future taoiseach Enda Kenny spoke for many.

“I regret the inadequacy of the words that I will use to deal with the Ryan commission report,” he told the House. 

“I cannot speak with the conviction, truth of recollection, or vividness of the nightmare through which so many of our young children went to grow into adulthood. Nor can I speak with the power of the emotion to which I listened yesterday or in recent weeks. 

"All I can do is speak as a citizen, the leader of my party, and the father of a young family and try to imagine what those young boys and girls went through in the torture of their minds, given the extent of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.” 

Kenny’s words were emotionally imparted, no doubt deeply felt, and reflected the sadness and horror of many. Yet, when he and his party made it into government less than two years later, the urgency in assisting survivors appeared to dissipate somewhat.

In 2012, the Residential Institutions Statutory Fund, known as Caranua, was set up to assist survivors as a response to Ryan. A total of about €110m, donated by religious congregations, was invested in the fund. 

This was designed to help out with financial aid, medical expenses, pension requirements and anything that might ease their passage through their winter years after a life that began in such traumatic circumstances. 

The State did not contribute to this fund as the government pointed out that over €1.5bn had already been spent on the residential redress board. Applications to Caranua for assistance opened in January 2014.

Did Caranua's fulfil its remit?

There are two versions of how Caranua fulfilled its remit. The official version is contained in a nine-page ‘evaluation report’ completed in 2020. A total of 6,181 survivors who contacted Caranua were eligible for services. In order to evaluate the service, 183 of these survivors were contacted and 59 agreed to participate in questionnaires. 

Out of that came the result that: “More than three-quarters of the participants thought the service provided by Caranua was ‘excellent’, ‘very good’, or ‘good’.” 

Tom Cronin doesn’t recognise that result. Tom and his brothers spent time in Upton industrial school in his childhood, but he emphasises he knows many who had it far worst than himself.

There is only one word to use about how Caranua conducted itself and that is disgraceful.” 

“I saw it as a survivor and as a member of the board. I could see it from the inside and outside and from both it was awful how they treated people. I would have no interest in saying that if it wasn’t true. It looked to me like they begrudged the survivors everything that was given.” 

His opinion was echoed by many other survivors and chimed with the accounts given by TDs and senators when Caranua came before Oireachtas committees.

Tom Cronin: 'The Government and particularly the Department [of Education] has been dragged and hauled through this as a very reluctant participant.' Picture: Eddie O'Hare

Tom Cronin’s brother Paul says he had various issues when he had a medical problem and Caranua would not contribute to his bills despite initial assurances. However, his biggest problem involved those whom he considers less fortunate than himself.

“I asked one of the people in there about these two guys who I knew who couldn’t read or write and there was a lot of form filling to be done to access anything,” he says. 

“They would come to me about a form and come back because they couldn’t read the form. That was a simple thing like getting a few teeth out would take six months before the dentist got the go-ahead to do it.

“I gave them a hand but I told Caranua there must be dozens more in the same situation. Could we get somebody to deal with these people? She said she’d look into it. She might still be looking into it because she never did anything about it.” 

Elizabeth's story

Elizabeth Coppin spent time in the industrial school in Tralee and left for England in 1969. Later in life, she got to know her mother and came back to live in Kerry. She made applications to Caranua to have new windows put into her home which was a poor state. 

“I was happy with what I got in the end but I had to really fight for it,” she says. 

“I came home and had the opportunity to get to know my mother later in life for which I’m very grateful, but they [Caranua] didn’t make it easy. It was as if they begrudged us anything, and in that way, some of us felt it was like the attitude towards us when we were growing up all over again.” 

Another survivor who spoke to the Irish Examiner but wishes to remain anonymous, applied to Caranua when she was in the US, where she lived for decades. She was born in the Bessborough home and fostered out to parents who were brought before the courts for cruelty to children. 

At four and a half she was sent by the court to the Good Shepherd home in Cork where she lived until she was 16.

“For me, more than anything I had wanted to be educated,” she says. 

“I wanted the education I didn’t get a child. I got my BA and wanted to study for a masters. I was told Caranua would cover my education. I was told I had to apply when doing the course but I had to show the college that I had the money to do it but they [Caranua] wouldn’t budge on it. I was very upset about the whole thing because education is everything to me.” 

Later, she encountered further problems when she applied for assistance in putting a new roof on her home. 

“I had to get quotes, I had to explain to contractors, male strangers, that they had to present me with their tax, business, and bank details so I could send those details to Caranua, rather than them sending the stuff direct. 

Then Caranua decided based on that whether to give the money or not. I wrote to Caranua and said that this is our money. I am a responsible human being. It was humiliating.” 

While some survivors obviously encountered these kinds of barriers, the agency was obliged to have financial controls in place to ensure the money was being distributed in a fair and equitable manner. 

An audit of the agency covering 2014 to 2019 pointed out there were “weaknesses in internal control where the board’s procedures were not always followed in respect of payments to survivors”.

For example, in over one-third of cases in 2019 where invoices and receipts were required for payments they had not been recorded. There was also a case of suspected fraud to the value of over €11,000 which the gardaí are investigating. 

These details do illustrate that the agency had to balance the needs and sensitivities of survivors with the requirement for financial controls and in some scenarios, this was extremely difficult.

Solicitor Fionna Fox, who offered her services on a voluntary basis to survivors who were having difficulty with Caranua, says a better balance could have been struck between maintaining financial controls and providing appropriate supports to survivors.

“Ultimately this was a scheme to help survivors, many of whom had little education, and for many the tremendous bureaucratic requirements laid down by Caranua was excessive,” she says. 

In my view, Caranua seemed more concerned with being able to demonstrate that they had tight controls over the administration of the fund than in providing appropriate support to enable survivors to access those funds. 

"Caranua failed to balance the need for necessary financial controls with its statutory requirement to meet the needs of survivors. It was so overly obsessed with financial regularity that is all they seemed to focus on.” 

Ms Fox found she encountered repeated difficulties in getting Caranua to operate properly in compliance with the statute and the guidance. 

“There were a huge number of cases where Caranua acted in breach of the act and the guidelines. Looking back on it now, a lot of it was down to a failure to govern themselves properly and there was no effective oversight.” 

The board of the agency was designed to include four survivors from a full complement of nine members. Tom Cronin took up one of the survivor positions in 2016 but he didn’t last long.

“I resigned after a short while,” he says. 

“As far as I could see the agenda was set before the board meetings took place. I remember on one occasion I made three or four attempts to have a topic raised at a board meeting. 

"I had to threaten to go back to the minister and say that the agenda was set out beforehand so they finally included it. But there was never a vote taken on anything that was brought up during the board meetings while I was there.” 

Marty Lodato took up one of the positions reserved for survivors in 2017.

“I was asked to join and felt I could bring something because of my involvement with survivors in the UK. I stayed for about six months,” she says. 

I felt they weren’t interested in listening to survivors’ voices. At each board meeting, my impression was that a lot of meetings went on outside those and that things were decided there and we were sort of expected to rubberstamp all that. 

"It was very difficult to try and raise issues. I was advised that my duties were in the first instance to the board rather than to survivors and it was stated that we had to manage the expectations of survivors. After much consideration, I decided I had to resign.”

Those running Caranua repeatedly pushed back against these kind of criticisms. At a Public Accounts Committee meeting in December 2020, the chief executive of the agency Rachel Downes refused to acknowledge the experience of all survivors had not necessarily been a happy one.

“I’m very proud to work with Caranua,” she told the meeting after repeated questions from Fianna Fáil TD Paul McAuliffe. The TD suggested her failure to acknowledge this was “doing a disservice to all the good work that you might have done”. 

Mr Downes replied she would be “happy to speak to anyone who might raise the issue with me.” 

The evaluation report echoed Ms Downes emphasis on the positive. 

“87% of survivors questioned believed the support given to them by Caranua was ‘very important’ or ‘important’ in their lives,” the report’s conclusion states. 

“For some, the difference in the quality of their lives was monetary, for others it was assistance at a bad time in their lives or that the support helped improve their mental or physical health.” 

The report also canvassed opinion from staff who had served in the agency and the result of that does chime with some of the concerns that were expressed by survivors. 

The response on what learnings could be taken from the experience of the agency included: “Staff should have an awareness of the complex nature and needs of survivors; the importance of all staff receiving trauma-informed care training and the importance of having enough staff who are trained and supported for the task.” 

Attempts to contact Ms Downes were unsuccessful. A request for an interview with her or other senior figures in Caranua through the Department of Education received the following response: “It would not be appropriate for the department to seek to facilitate an interview with Ms Downes or any former chair of the agency.”

Following the winding-up of the agency, plans were put in place to provide a service to those survivors who still had outstanding needs at a late stage in their lives. 

Two facilitators were appointed to meet with the survivors and assess their needs. There was also a few meetings with department officials, including one attended by Education Minister Norma Foley. Following that, a committee was established to produce a report on the best way to proceed. The members of this committee were made up of senior civil servants from the departments of Education, Children, Employment and Enterprise, Social Protection, Housing, Foreign Affairs, and Justice.

The reasoning behind such a composition is unclear but it does illustrate that the process is now being viewed as something to be tightly controlled within government. Solicitor Fionna Fox believes the composition of the group speaks volumes.

“They created that inter-department committee simply because there is no money available or rather they don’t want to make money available and they really just want to sit on it,” she says.

Tom Cronin’s view is equally jaundiced.

“The Government and particularly the Department [of Education] has been dragged and hauled through this as a very reluctant participant,” he says. 

“That attitude goes all the way back, for instance, to when Judge Mary Lafoy felt she had to resign because of how it was being handled. If the past isn’t dealt with properly, our society now or in the future just will not progress.” 

A spokesperson for the Department of Education responded to questions where the process of attending to the remaining needs of survivors with the following statement: “A number of published reports have highlighted the ongoing needs of survivors and the lifelong difficulties they experience due to their childhood experiences in residential care. 

"A survivor-led consultative forum was also established and has provided a very good insight into the issues of concern to survivors.

“This work is currently being considered by the department with input from colleagues from other departments. Significant resources are being devoted to progressing this as quickly as possible, to feed into proposals to Government.”