Documenting harrowing experiences has been a feature of a variety of inquiries in recent years, including the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, the report of which was published in 2009.
At the time of its publication, it was described by the late journalist Mary Raftery, who had done so much to highlight historic institutional abuse, as “a monument to a society’s shame”.
While Raftery identified some weaknesses in the report and argued its recommendations were too vague, she suggested what it had done “with great thoroughness, is to give us a compelling vision of the hell to which so many children were consigned”.
That “compelling vision” could not have been presented without the power of personal testimony. In providing such an overwhelming body of evidence about what went on in residential institutions, the report provided a corrective to the atmosphere of secrecy and denial that surrounded these experiences for so many years and invaluable information on attitudes to child welfare.
This could not have been done without the voices of the victims.
When giving evidence before the commission in September 2005, one of the Christian Brothers leaders, Brother Michael Reynolds, said: “I have one group of people saying there was a lot of corporal punishment and I have documentation saying there wasn’t.”
It was a simple reminder that those seeking answers as to why and how abuse occurred needed to be mindful of the limitations of archives; they will not always contain the answers that are being sought, and even if archival material can tell us what happened, it will rarely tell us what it felt like.
Cursory
The question of access to documentation has been central to the complaints of abuse survivors and is a central issue for historians and others seeking to find the truth of what went on.
Many of the assertions made at the public hearings were based on the documentation available to the religious orders, which at times, like many administrative records, is cursory and formulaic.
The gulf between the officially documented version of events in institutions and the experiences of those who lived through them could not be addressed without personal testimony, but this also raised the question of what would happen to that testimony when the inquiry was finished.
The destruction of this testimony has been mooted at different stages, but it has now been reported that the Cabinet has approved the drafting of a Bill to transfer the records of the commission and the Residential Institutions Redress Board set up in 2002 to compensate those abused in the institutions, to the National Archives, where they will be sealed for 75 years.
Internationally, it is not unusual for material regarded as sensitive to be sealed for such a period, to protect personal privacy and ensure it is not released during the lifetime of those it refers to.
However, the decision to follow this practice in relation to the Irish child abuse records has divided the groups representing victims, indicating the issue is fraught and raw.
Legal action
Tom Cronin of Irish Survivors of Institutional Abuse expressed dismay that the material would be sealed for so long and that there might be an unwitting frustration of possible future legal action by survivors, while the Aislinn group has also been scathing, suggesting the move perpetuates the original abuse.
In contrast, Maeve Lewis of One in Four made the point this week that while the Ryan report will remain as a crucial monument to what happened, it “cannot replace the intensity of the direct, explicit accounts of the survivors”.
Moving the material to the National Archives, she argues, “will help generations to come to understand the real nature of Irish society then and will ensure the appalling history can never be forgotten”.
Victims groups have also been divided in relation to how the recommendation of the Ryan commission that a memorial should be erected “as a permanent public acknowledgment of their experiences” should be approached.
There are no easy answers to these emotive questions. Victims of abuse have many reasons to be distrustful of officialdom when it comes to records and their access, but at least a move to the National Archives will ensure that in the future, chroniclers of 20th century Ireland will be able to cite the experiences of the victims alongside pious assertions from those who could not or would not accept that the institutions they exalted were destroying the lives of so many Irish children.
This material will belong to the Irish people, as the National Archives does not take in documents that are not to be released to the public. As the files are a vital part of Ireland’s story, their long-term future and accessibility need to be safeguarded and the proposed initiative will ensure that.