The Minister for Education is to be congratulated for her alacrity in establishing an investigation into sexual abuse in some schools after RTÉ’s distressing Doc on One exposé last November about priests who preyed on boys with apparent impunity in Blackrock College. The contrast with the political foot-dragging over other child abuse scandals suggests that lessons have been learned about the need for speeded-up and thorough procedures for accountability.
Or have they? This week, the Department of Education advertised an invitation for abuse survivors to register their interest in participating in a scoping inquiry, which is being, explicitly, restricted to “schools run by religious orders”. Ergo only children abused in certain Catholic schools need apply. Church of Ireland schools, for instance, tend not to be run by religious orders, being mostly operated under the aegis of the local bishop or by Protestant laity. Robert MacCarthy, a former dean of the Anglican St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, has detected from the inquiry’s remit a prevailing attitude that the Catholic Church “is inherently more to be mistrusted than any other organisation”, as he put it in a letter to this newspaper last month.
To criticise any plans for a swiftly-established State investigation into the abuse of children is to run amok in a meadow of delicate sensitivities. It is not my intention to cause further hurt to anyone who has suffered such abuse and who may get the opportunity to be heard now. Yet it cannot go unremarked that the Government’s admirably quick response to the revelation of abuses perpetrated by members of the Spiritan order – formerly known as the Holy Ghost Fathers – in Blackrock, Rockwell, St Mary’s and other fee-paying schools jars with the experiences of many survivors of abuse in less privileged and in non-Catholic schools. These different approaches contravene a basic premise that justice must be applied equally to all perpetrators and be equally available to all their victims.
Heroic courage
It takes heroic courage for anyone who was raped or molested as a child to, first of all, confront the memory of it and, then, to insist on being listened to and having what was done to them acknowledged. The men who took part in the RTÉ documentary about Blackrock College demonstrated a strength of character with the power to jolt the political system into action.
Indomitable perseverance was also demonstrated by Louise O’Keeffe, who was sexually abused by Leo Hickey, her principal at Dunderrow national school, Co Cork in the 1970s. He was convicted in 1998 on 387 sample counts of abusing her and 20 other former pupils. After he was jailed, the State fought O’Keeffe’s claim that it had been vicariously liable for her abuse, right through the High Court and the Supreme Court, until the European Court of Human Rights ruled in her favour in 2014. Despite her victory, the last government repeatedly defended its policy of disqualifying from the resultant redress scheme other plaintiffs with similar cases who had abandoned their court actions after the State threatened to pursue them for legal costs.
Several of those survivors became a regular fixture outside Leinster House as they tirelessly campaigned for their right to compensation. Under the terms of the new scoping inquiry into abuse in schools, Hickey’s victims would have no right of audience because Dunderrow national school is run by trustees appointed by the local bishop, and not by a religious order.
Why does someone who was raped as a child in a national school not have the same right of audience at a State inquiry as someone who was raped as a child in a school operated by a religious order?
It is worth noting that, even as the inquiry is being conceived, one of the country’s biggest religious orders in the education of children, the Christian Brothers, is playing a cruelly cynical game of pass-the-parcel with survivors by refusing to nominate someone to receive legal documents on the congregation’s behalf for civil lawsuits, thus compelling plaintiffs to serve about 100 congregation members individually, thereby piling on cost, time and anguish.
With some exceptions, Christian Brothers’ schools have not had the same cachet or claim to social entre as those run by the Spiritans, where, traditionally, the children of the professional classes have been educated. Of course, no child should be pilloried for being born into privilege, just as no child from the other side of the tracks should be either. Nor should religious denomination be a definition for treating anyone unequally. To do so is nothing less than sectarian.
Another school whose past pupils are unlikely to be considered eligible to participate in the new scoping inquiry is St Patrick’s Cathedral grammar school in Dublin, which is part of the Anglican Church but not under the auspices of an order. It was in this school and its associated choir that a man called Patrick O’Brien sexually abused a boy and was given a suspended jail sentence for it in 1989. Grotesquely, he was allowed to return to work there as a volunteer after his conviction. Nearly two decades later, he was found guilty again of abusing other boys there.
Different standards
Why is a different standard being applied to the sexual assault of a boy in a Protestant school to the sexual assault of a boy in a Catholic school? Why does someone who was raped as a child in a national school not have the same right of audience at a State inquiry as someone who was raped as a child in a school operated by a religious order?
These are questions loaded with human sensitivities but they are fundamental to the ethos of the republic that emerged from the Easter Rising’s aspiration for an independent Irish republic that would cherish all of its children equally. Norma Foley, the Minister for Education, needs to answer these questions before any commission of investigation starts to examine failures in the safeguarding of schoolchildren.
Unless she can explain, convincingly, the justification for setting up an inquiry dedicated primarily to one social class and exclusively to one religious denomination, this inquiry will be undermined before it even begins. And that will not be good for anybody. Unless united we stand, divided we will fail.