Deputy Ruairí Quinn

Dail Debate on Ryan Report on the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse
12:00pm, 11th June 2009.

Deputy Ruairí Quinn:

As we all do, I have limited time available to speak, and no words of mine or of anybody else in the House can undo the damage, harm or hurt caused to and which continues for those people. However, the actions that we take can make some redress to them, their children and their children’s children. I appreciate the point made by the Taoiseach, which is contained in one of the recommendations, that we erect a monument containing the words of the apology that the Taoiseach uttered in May 1999 but I suggest we should go further. We should have a living monument dedicated to those people, some of whom are no longer with us, that contains their stories and memories and our records of abuse, both clerical and State, and inhuman treatment so that the walking wounded, emotionally and physically, who are the people who came to the gates of this assembly yesterday can be able to point to a permanent record of their hurt to explain in part to their children and to their children’s children why they, with their stolen childhoods, could not live full lives as adults.

My next point is more substantial and I am delighted the Taoiseach is here with his colleague and friend, the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Batt O’Keeffe, because I have a serious set of allegations to make against both of them. The problem with the Watergate controversy was that the burglary was wrong but the cover-up was worse. We have compounded our criticism of the religious orders and the church in this regard and we have let free the horrendous record of the Department of Education and Science that continues to the present day. We have castigated in financial terms the regulators for the failure to regulate the banks but the Department of Education and Science has got away scot free in many respects and continues to do so.

I put it to the Minister that there is a continuing culture of deferment and obedience to the Catholic church and its religious orders in the Department of Education and Science that has continually frustrated getting answers to simple questions of which I will provide three examples. It is for the Minister to refute this and he knows from my persistent questioning that it is not for the want of trying on my part to establish facts free of prejudice. On 26 February I asked the Minister for Education and Science “if he [would] enter into talks with an organisation (details supplied) [CORI], some of whose members, as teaching orders, are the legal owners of many of the primary schools”. The answer I received was that he would not and that the information as to who owned what school of the 3,200 schools throughout the country was not readily available in an easily accessible format.

On 10 March I asked the Minister whether he would “identify by name, roll number, location and Roman Catholic diocese, each primary school in the ownership of a religious teaching order or a Roman Catholic bishop”. The reply stated that there are in excess of 3,200 primary schools in the country and my net point centres on the following paragraph of the reply:

Information relating to school site ownership and property details would have been received by my Department over a long number of years and the legal documents relating to the interest of the State in buildings constructed on sites not in the ownership of the State are generally held on individual files as distinct from a central database. Accordingly, the information requested by the Deputy is not readily available in a format that is readily retrievable.

This is what is happening on Marlborough Street and the Minister may spend much time in Cork but I wish he would spend more time there. On 28 May in another question I named the [587]18 congregations, which the Taoiseach met this week. I will read the second part of the reply I received as time does not permit me to read it out in full but the records are there. It states:

These schools are privately owned and as such the information sought by the Deputy is not readily available in a format that is readily retrievable [The Minister does not even change the text]. The legal documents relating to the interest of the State in buildings constructed on sites not in the ownership of the State are generally held on individual files as distinct from a central database.

Either officials in the Department are members of secret societies such as the Knights of St. Columbanus and Opus Dei and have taken it upon themselves to protect the interests of these clerical orders at this point in time in this year of 2009 or, alternatively, the Minister is politically incompetent and incapable of managing the Department of Education and Science. He went from February to last week saying that the information was not readily available.

The Taoiseach met with the same religious orders. Imagine what he could have said; imagine what power the Taoiseach could have had if he could have said to the 18 orders that, for example the Christian Brothers have 97 schools, paid for mostly by taxpayers through voluntary contributions and grants, and that the Sisters of Mercy and other orders together have perhaps 300 or 400 schools — I am guessing because these guys refuse to tell me.

The legal ownership of those schools should be transferred without any contribution and in return the schools should continue for the time being under the existing patronship arrangements until such time as we democratically and collectively decide how best to do it. We are the only country in Europe — including countries such as Catholic Spain, Catholic Italy and Catholic Austria — where the primary school system is controlled by private organisations. If one thinks they are not private one should examine the court decision on Louise O’Keeffe and how the State was not responsible for the abuse she received from a primary school teacher, who was not a religious person, but that the responsibility lies with the boards of management of the private organisations.

We have to deal with this problem and this is the way we start. The Taoiseach has asked the orders to return in two weeks with an inventory of their assets. The man sitting beside him knows what they are and he is refusing to tell me, a Deputy of this House. I do not believe the Minister, Deputy O’Keeffe, is a bad man. I do not believe he is a Catholic right-wing secret obscurantist but many of the people working for him on a permanent salary — he will be gone in a couple of years — most certainly are or else they are incompetent, lazy and destructive. He can take his choice as to what the explanation is but I have given him the facts. He and his Department are concealing from us, the citizens of the Republic, information on the nature and ownership of schools. I am unable to go into it but one of the replies I received was simply a lie; it suggested that legal protocols were in existence that prevented schools from being sold off. That is not the case for the vast majority of those schools, many of which are in built up areas and were built prior to 1960 when such protocols came into existence.

Build the monument and make it a living lasting voice of what we did. This was not some era of colonial exploitation; this was not the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the country; this is what we did to ourselves for the reasons Deputy Gilmore stated. We should have not just a monument but a living museum and a permanent reminder that never again can it happen and an explanation for those who were affected and their families as to why they were the way they were.

To learn for the future we need to take these schools and our entire primary school infrastructure into public ownership. We are paying for them and funding them. We need to get the management controls that are necessary to bring us into line with every other European coun[588]try. The Government has a golden opportunity; the value of 500 schools at €2 million or €3 million each is close to €1 billion. It will go a long way in the eyes of the public towards saying that we are sorry for what happened and for our consistent denial and refusal to recognise our responsibility. It would ensure that whoever is Minister for Education and Science in the future has rational control of the infrastructure to get the best productivity from it.

The Minister, Deputy Batt O’Keeffe, has a serious responsibility to either manage that Department in a modern and effective way or to root out the obstruction that is manifestly evident in the consistent replies I have received from him in the past year.

Acting Chairman:

I know the Deputy did not mean to use the word “lie”. I take it——
Deputy Ruairí Quinn:
I withdraw the word “lie” and say “inadvertently misled the House”.

APOSTOLIC VISITATION REPORT

I would like to take the opportunity to respond briefly to the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland.

The reasons given by the Vatican for this Visitation were:

• To offer assistance to the Bishops, clergy, religious and lay faithful as they seek to respond adequately to the situation caused by the tragic cases of abuse perpetrated by priests and religious upon minors.

• To contribute to the desired spiritual and moral renewal that is already being vigorously pursued by the Church in Ireland.

• To explore more deeply questions concerning the handling of cases of abuse and the assistance owed to the victims.

• To monitor the effectiveness of and seek possible improvements to the current procedures for preventing abuse.

I did not participate in this exercise because I did not believe it would serve any credible purpose. I was of the view that instead it would be used by the Vatican to maintain the pretence that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and the subsequent cover up of that abuse by Catholic Bishops was an Irish problem which it knew nothing about, and this is simply not true. Catholic Bishops & Cardinals have been concealing the sexual abuse of children for decades from one side of the world to the other and it is not believable that this was not known in the Vatican.
With this Summary Report the Vatican has failed yet again to acknowledge and take responsibility for its role in facilitating a culture of cover up which has caused the sexual abuse of so many children. Continued calls for ‘forgiveness’ are meaningless in this context.

The Summary Report also urges Irish Catholic Bishops to spend more time listening to victims. Members of the Catholic Hierarchy in Ireland and in the Vatican have repeatedly disrespected and ignored the voices and views of those who have been abused and I have no reason to believe that has, or will, change.

I said in October 2010 that the Apostolic Visitation is nothing more than self-serving window-dressing nonsense, and nothing I’ve read today has changed my mind.
END 20/03/2012

Mary Raftery

I wish to express my deep sadness today on hearing of the death of Mary Raftery.

Mary was instrumental in helping many of us as we sought to expose the truth about what the Catholic Church and others knew about the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Ireland. Mary understood that the Catholic Church’s concealment of the sexual abuse of children was systemic but that it could best be exposed by helping survivors share personal experience and through her work provided a way for some of us to do that.

Mary Raftery has contributed hugely to helping survivors receive some semblance of justice: The Ryan and Murphy Reports are now part of the public record of this country and will remain there and continue to inform us for many years. For too many survivors, having those Reports on the public record is the only justice they have ever received.

I will be forever grateful to Mary for all she has done to help shed a light where it wasn’t wanted and I offer my condolences to her family, friends and loved ones.

END 10/01/2012

The Optimist V The Pessimist

The Optimist V The Pessimist

A family had twin boys whose only resemblance to each other was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other thought it was too cold. If one said the TV was too loud, the other claimed the volume needed to be turned up. Opposite in every way, one was an eternal optimist, the other a doom and gloom pessimist.

Just to see what would happen, on the twins' birthday their father loaded the pessimist's room with every imaginable toy and game. The optimist's room he loaded with horse manure.

That night the father passed by the pessimist's room and found him sitting amid his new gifts crying bitterly.

"Why are you crying?" the father asked.

"Because my friends will be jealous, I'll have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I'll constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually get broken." answered the pessimist twin.

Passing the optimist twin's room, the father found him dancing for joy in the pile of manure. "What are you so happy about?" he asked.

To which his optimist twin replied, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"

Child Sexual Abuse, Catholic Priests and Confession.

At the end of October this year, psychotherapist and social worker Dr Marie Keenan published an analysis of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. In the book, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church (Oxford University Press, New York) - Dr Keenan identifies the problem of child sexual abuse as not just within the individual psychology of the perpetrators, but also within the very makeup of the priesthood and the organisational structures of the Catholic Church. Some may agree, or not.

I was looking forward to reading this book as it had promised to let us hear the voices of some of the priests who had sexually abused children and those bishops who had covered up for them. On both counts the book disappoints, but I was struck by one thing: eight out of the nine offending priests, who participated in Dr Keenan’s research, had disclosed their sexual abuse of children in confession.

The extracts from Chapter 8 below make up most of what the priests and Dr Keenan had to say on the subject matter. I was already steadfast in my belief that the Catholic Church should not be granted any exemption from new child protection legislation that the Irish Government is planning to publish in the coming months, this only serves to reinforce that belief.

Priest:
The only ones who would have sensed what I was going through were my confessors – they were carefully selected by me, and time and time again I recounted my temptations and falls, my scruples and shame. They after all were bound to a strict code of secrecy. I was known personally to them all. They were my lifelines.

Dr Keenan:
The word ‘secrecy’ is interesting in this man’s account. For all of the clerical perpetrators, the confession made bearable what was for them, at times, a complex site of paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity in which their self identity and performance were at odds, and the performance of integrity was severely undermined.

The anonymity and confidentiality of the confessional became an important avenue for disclosure of sexual and emotional distress and ultimately for disclosure of sexual offending. Eight of them disclosed their sexual offending in the confessional. The confessional became a space for them between the ideal and the reality. It was a secret conversational space, not only of forgiveness but also of ‘externalising’ the issues ‘in safety’.

Priest:
After each abusive occurrence I felt full of guilt and at the earliest opportunity I sought to confess and receive absolution. While this was well intentioned there is a sense in which it was a mechanical process, but it effected a degree of relief and a feeling of a new beginning. There was always a resolution that it would not occur again – and yet experience should have told me that that was an unrealistic purpose of amendment given my awareness of my inclinations and that opportunity was frequently presented.

There were times of guilt, shame, and fear that I would get caught but I used confession to clean the slate. I minimised everything in this area...convincing myself that I would never do it again, especially after confession. It seemed to ease my conscience that I was truly making an effort to change and to stop...and going to confession and being able to couch it such a way that you know I didn’t have to give the full story, until one day towards perhaps the second last abuse I went to confession and this man absolutely just went for me...he just said to me, ’you know what you are doing is not alone morally wrong, but it is a criminal act’.

In all the times I confessed to abusing a minor I can only remember one occasion when I got a reprimand or advice not to do this again. In a strange way the sacramental confession let us off the hook rather lightly, and perhaps allowed us to realise what was actually happening...Perhaps I minimised in my accounts, but I do not think so. I certainly agonised as to how to present the abuse, and maybe the language used probably veiled the horror of the action. It was not open denial, but maybe it was not unadulterated truth either. The practice allowed us to feel that the disapproval and shame we experienced in telling was only short-lived and never likely to be discussed anywhere except there. Not confronted adequately we experienced only a short duration of guilt and no sense of responsibility for how we hurt others, only the alleviation of our own guilt and shame.

Dr Keenan:
Receiving confession played a role in easing the men’s conscience in coping with the moral dilemmas following episodes of abusing, and it provided a site of respite from guilt. For some of the men it also helped them think that they were making an effort to change. As the men oscillated between a sense of ‘self’ and ‘false-self’ that at times undermined their stability and sense of security, the confessional became a site that provided respite from such a conflicted existence.

The narratives show that their belief in God sustained the participants through some difficult times. They believed that God, who was aware they were struggling to be good, would love them in spite of their weaknesses if they sought forgiveness, were genuinely remorseful, and did their best not to abuse again. God was always available in confession. The men saw themselves as sinners, and they tried to repent. God and the confessional provided the key site of support and hope for them, especially when they were abusing boys. However, the narratives also give rise to some important observations regarding the function of confession. It is notable that only one confessor on one occasion, among the many times that the men disclosed their abusive behaviour in confession, pointed out the criminal nature of the sexual abuse. The very process of confession itself might therefore be seen as having enabled the abuse to continue, not only in how the men used the secrecy and safety of the confessional space to resolve the issues of guilt, but also in the fact that within the walls of the confession, the problem of the sexual abuse of children was contained. While the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’ (1994) makes clear that the seal is a fundamental aspect of the theology of the sacrament of confession, and it is not the function of the confessor to judge the confessant, nonetheless no pathway existed for this important information of abuse by clergy, which was emerging in the confessional, to flow back into the system, to alert the Church hierarchy to a growing problem. The fact that the problem was individualised at the level of the confessional is an important feature of abuse by clergy.

Altar Boy, A Story Of Life After Abuse,

Altar Boy, A Story Of Life After Abuse, by Andrew Madden

The Kindle edition of Altar Boy is now available here http://amzn.to/paCkdG

[Kindle Edition for Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android devices, PC, and Mac.]

‘Although I still carry many of the effects of child abuse I no longer consider myself a victim. I’ve done something about it. I’ve turned it around.’

Becoming an altar boy was Andrew Madden's first step toward realising his dream of becoming a priest. It was brilliant – getting to go behind the scenes in a busy parish church, helping on the altar in front of everyone – and he couldn’t wait to be grown up and saying Mass himself. But the day Andrew was molested by his favourite priest, Father Ivan Payne, his love of the Catholic Church was poisoned. Father’s Payne’s abuse lasted for three years, until Andrew was fifteen. But its impact went on and on. Andrew lost direction. He lost self-belief. He lost the capacity to have loving sex. And he lost himself in drink.

In the early '90s Andrew reached a financial settlement with Father Payne. He would go on to become the first Irish victim of sexual abuse by a priest to go public with his story. Altar Boy is the story behind that story.

Altar Boy is a candid, and sometimes searing, account of how abuse can affect a life. It is an articulate, challenging and often damning assessment of the behaviour of the Irish Catholic Church. And it is a story of hope: Andrew Madden’s calm and humane consideration of his own life - and Father Payne’s - shows that victims don’t have to remain victims.

STAY SAFE and SPHE Programmes

From today, teaching of the Stay Safe Programme in Ireland's 3,300 primary schools becomes mandatory. At least 80% of schools had already been teaching the Stay Safe Programme which is great, but nothing less than 100% compliance is acceptable.

Here is some information on the Stay Safe Programme and also the SPHE (Social Personl Health Education) Programme for secondary schools along with some recommendations.

THE STAY SAFE PROGRAMME

The Stay Safe Programme is a personal safety skills programme for primary schools - both mainstream and special. Its overall objective is to prevent child abuse, bullying and other forms of victimisation. There are 5 modules:

Feeling Safe/Unsafe
Bullying
Touches
Secrets and Telling
Strangers.

Implementation:
Senior Infants 9 lessons 20 minutes each
1st/2nd 9 lessons 30 minutes each
3rd/4th 9 lessons 30 minutes each
5th/6th 5 lessons 30 minutes each

It's recommended that lessons are taught at the rate of one per week. This programme is mandatory as of today 30 September 2011.

STAYSAFE/SPHE (Social Personal Health Education)

Social, Personal and Health Education, as part of the curriculum, supports the personal development, health and well-being of young people and helps them create and maintain supportive relationships. Social, Personal and Health Education in Post-Primary schools is a programme for students in the Junior/Senior Cycle and builds on the experience of all children at Primary level.

There are 10 modules at Junior Cycle:

Belonging and Integrating
Self-management: A sense of purpose
Communication Skills
Physical Health
Friendships
Relationships and Sexuality
Emotional Health
Influences and Decisions
Substance Use
Personal Safety

Implementation:
All mandatory, 1 class per week.

There are 5 modules at Senior Cycle:

Relationships & Sexuality Education (RSE)
Substance Use
Mental Health
Gender Studies
Physical Activity and Nutrition

Implementation:
RSE is only module which is mandatory. 6 classes per year is mandatory minimum.
Although RSE is mandatory, parents do have the right to withdraw their children from this module.

Recommendations

1. There should be a module in the SPHE programme dedicated specifically to safety, welfare and protection of children at post-primary (as a continuation of the Stay Safe programme at primary level). There is a module on Personal Safety (Junior Cycle) but it does not include child protection issues etc. This module should:

i. inform young people about legal issues re sexual behaviour, consent and what care means.
ii. inform young people about what is appropriate and inappropriate care from a care-giver.
iii. increase young people’s awareness of self- protective skills and abuse.

Evaluation should be built into this module to assess knowledge and skills before and after the lessons. This new module is needed in order to ensure that students who may be withdrawn by parents from RSE still receive the information about protecting themselves.

2. All SPHE Modules should be introduced at senior cycle as a matter of priority.

3. SPHE should be allocated 2 classes per week from First Year to Senior Cycle.

4. Children’s knowledge of SPHE should be assessed by means of a written evaluation and an interview (there is assessment of every other subject on the curriculum).

5. SPHE should be viewed as a specialist area like Guidance & Counselling. Not everyone is suited to teach this subject and yet in many cases teachers find SPHE on their timetables without having agreed to teach this subject. In order to be accepted on to a Guidance and Counselling course, applicants are required to undergo a rigorous interview and personality test. Given the nature of Social Personal & Health Education, there should be similar requirements of SPHE teachers. All teachers should receive a basic SPHE pre-service training as all teachers are involved in social and personal education of young people. A more specialised training should be given to those teachers who will be delivering SPHE as a curricular area.