Full report

The full horror of children’s lives destroyed by sexual, physical and emotional abuse meted out by Roman Catholic religious orders over decades in Ireland was revealed yesterday in an official five-volume report.

A nine-year investigation by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse concluded that the Irish Government colluded in a conspiracy of silence as no action was taken to prevent the sexual abuse of thousands of children who passed through Catholic-run institutions, even though the abuse was known to be endemic.

The report makes relentlessly grim reading, chronicling the shocking conditions under which about 35,000 children were held, many from infancy until adulthood.

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On reading this terrible litany of shame, many will wonder whether the Church is worth saving

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“I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions,” said Cardinal Sean Brady, Ireland’s most senior cleric, last night.

The report’s publication was delayed by several years after a lengthy legal battle waged by the Christian Brothers to withhold the names of all its members, dead or alive. An agreement was eventually struck in 2004, allowing the Christian Brothers’ institutions to be identified.

More than a thousand witnesses testified to abuse in 216 schools and residential settings across Ireland over a period from 1914 to 2000. More than 800 individuals were identified as physical or sexual abusers — an extraordinary number compared with the handful of prosecutions and convictions. Ninety per cent of witnesses reported physical abuse while half reported sexual abuse.

“Acute and chronic contact and non-contact sexual abuse was reported, including vaginal and anal rape, molestation and voyeurism in both isolated cases and on a regular basis over long periods of time,” the document states.

“Female witnesses in particular described, at times, being told they were responsible for the sexual abuse they experienced, by both their abuser and those to whom they disclosed abuse,” the report said.

The 2,500-page document, which cost €70 million (£60 million) to compile, caused anger even before it was formally released when some victims who turned up to the Dublin launch were refused entry. The commission, chaired by Justice Sean Ryan, called police and threatened to make arrests.

“This is a farce, it’s an absolute sham,” shouted John Kelly, a victim. “Why are we being excluded? We were marginalised as children and you are doing the same to us again now!”

The commission found that the worst offender was the Christian Brothers order, which ran most of the institutions for older boys, while the Sisters of Mercy, which was supposed to care for girls, also came in for heavy criticism. The report said that cases were managed “with a view to minimising the risk of public disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation”.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” it said.

On the rare occasions that the Department of Education, which had legal responsibility for the children, received complaints of sexual abuse, it “dealt inadequately” with them.

Hundreds of pages detail the horrors of life at specific institutions. “It was a secret enclosed world, run on fear,” one Brother told the commission about St Joseph’s Industrial School in Tralee, Co Kerry.

Glin Industrial School, Co Limerick, was where “Brothers with a known propensity for sexual abuse were transferred, indicating a serious indifference to the safety of children”.

A whole chapter is devoted to a Christian Brother given the pseudonym of John Brander — real name Donal Dunne, who was convicted in 1999 of his crimes and given a two-year prison sentence — which describes his progress through six different schools where he physically terrorised and sexually abused children in his classroom.

The report says that his career, while shocking in itself, illustrated the ease with which sexual predators could operate within the educational system of the State without fear of disclosure or sanction.

Elsewhere it describes the practice of floggings at Daingean Reformatory School, Co Offaly, as ritualised beatings that should not have been tolerated. At two residential schools for deaf girls, run by the Dominican Order of Nuns and the Daughters of the Cross of Liège, the report says that some girls “did experience sexual abuse at the hands of ‘godfathers’ which they were unable to report or were disbelieved when they did”.

The new leader of Catholics in England and Wales said that the Irish clergy who admitted child abuse were courageous for facing up to their past. “That takes courage, and also we shouldn’t forget that this account today will also overshadow all of the good that they also did,” the Most Rev Vincent Nichols told ITV News.

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