Children Of The Poor Clares (37 page)

71
  This was untrue: we recorded only one of the interviews - with her permission, the one with Ann-Marie.

72
  There were however criticisms from Father Edward Flanagan, the Irish-born American priest who dedicated his life to working with delinquent and homeless boys. Boys Town, the home he founded in the mid-West, was the subject of a popular eponymously-titled movie. His statements in Ireland and the U.S. about the violent treatment of children in the Industrial and Reformatory Schools were treated with derision in the Dail.

73
  In 1946 Thomas Derrig, the long-time Minister of Education, rejected a call for a public inquiry into Industrial Schools. This followed Limerick Councillor Martin McGuire’s pressuring the Department to release 14-year old Gerard Fogarty from Glin Industrial School. Gerard had been flogged naked with a cat of nine tails and then immersed in salt water after an unsuccessful escape attempt. Derrig said an inquiry would ‘serve no useful purpose.’

74
  As agreed with her, this was not her real name

75
  See Chapters 4 and 5

76
  At the end of the interview, Sister Angela stated that she would not like the name of the Convent or the Order to be used because other Orders had similar institutions to this one around the country. We did not respond, and decided to identify it because a) we had made no preliminary agreement not to do so and b) it had played too important a role in the Cavan girls’ lives. However, we changed Sister Angela’s name, as we changed the names of all the nuns not known to be dead.

77
  See Chapter ‘A Christian Country’. We have this letter.

78
  This Act gave the Department of Health the power to ‘admit’ children into residential and foster homes. It ran parallel to the 1908 Children’s Act administered by the Department of Education. Cavan had one of the highest rates of fostering-out children in Ireland.

79
 

80
  We were given the same kind of courteous help in the Department of Local Government through the assistance of the Secretary to the then Minister, Jim Tully. The Department’s archives were searched for the transcripts of the Tribunal of Inquiry into the fire, and we were then given the freedom of their library to examine them at leisure.

81
  See
Suffer the Little Children

82
  One of the Industrial School regulations required that interested members of the public be permitted to visit on days specified by the individual schools.

83
  This change, according to some sources, was not initiated by the state authority, but by the late Bishop of Kilkenny, the Rev. Dr. Birch, who took a leading role in social reform in Ireland.

84
  This was not quite true: we had received the letter from the ex-nun we call Sister Constance describing an idyllic life in St. Joseph’s. We were also sent an unsigned letter which praised the nuns and said that bringing up the story of the fire would cause distress.

85
  See chapter 8.

86
  Statements made to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in May 2006.

87
  The origin of the money available for the investments was not made known.

88
  ‘The abuse I received at the hands of nuns and also lay staff was all done in the name of God. If Jesus Christ himself had been born in Ireland he would have been put in one of these institutions and his mother put in a Magdalene laundry. Mary Henderson, Number 97, sent aged aged 2 in 1935, to Goldenbridge, ‘to serve 14 yrs. now in London’.

89
  Christine Buckley, who spent her childhood in Goldenbridge, went on to form a survivors’ organisation called Aislinn. In 2004 members of this group wrote and performed a play ‘
Tears of a Clown’
in the Project Theatre, Dublin.

90
  See 3
rd
Interim Report, December 2003 and later in this chapter

91
  See “Suffer the Little Children: the Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools, by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan.

92
  The former Irish politician, Justin Keating, wrote in the Irish Humanist magazine in 1993: ‘The State was subsidizing the religious orders…a sort of clerical welfare state. One where the recipients of the welfare were given respect, trust and not questioned.’

93
  Other proposals included legal changes relating to how cases involving abuse should be dealt with, and the establishment of a register of sex offenders.

94
  When Patrick Walsh of Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA) was giving testimony at Redress Board - on the same day as Sr. Patricia Rogers, who was representing the Poor Clares—he stated that his group had attempted to get an amendment into the Residential Institutions Redress Act which would include ‘the infliction of pain and distress on a child’, but Mr. Ahern objected and it was narrowly voted down.

95
  In 2002 investment analysts referred to 2 billion euros invested by the Religious of Ireland in stock markets. Additional billions of euros were added to this sum as they continued to close and sell convents, hospitals, Magdalen Homes and Industrial School properties to developers in what was then an overheated economy. It emerged, however, that not all their properties could be easily sold because they were held in trust for specific uses, i.e. religious, educational or medical.

96
  See additional information in Church & State Magazine, No. 74, Autumn 2003

97
  Noel Dempsey, appointed in the summer of 1992, following a general election. The Ministry is now of Education and Science.

98
  The Sisters now kept their own names

99
  An Internet search reveals a list of solicitors trawling for custom from ex-pupils of Industrial and Reformatory Schools living in Ireland and the United Kingdom wishing to pursue claims through the Redress Board. In the 3
rd
Interim Report of the Inquiry into Child Abuse in December 2003, it was stated that where the involvement of the Complainant’s legal representative had been to prepare and submit a statement on behalf of a Complainant, legal costs claimed varied in amount from €4,053.50, at the lowest, to €11,228.80, at the highest. According to
The Irish Ttimes,
26
th
April 2005, costs and expenses paid to applicants’ solicitors had amounted on average to almost €11,000 per application. This accounted for 14% of the average award paid to an applicant. By May 20
th
, 2009, the Redress Board had paid out legal costs of € 138.5 million to solicitors’ firms,. According to the Irish Times’ Religious Affairs Correspondent, Patsy McGarry, June 13
th
, 2009, she had learned that eventual legal costs could reach € 400 million.

100
  Mr. Sweeney maintains that since the Board’s inception, 75 survivors have taken their own lives and that one man walked straight out of his meeting with the Redress Board and jumped into the River Liffey.

101
  Letter to the Irish Times May 19
th
2005

102
  In Bruce Arnold’s book
The Irish Gulag: How the State betrayed Its Innocent Children
, published in 2009, the author’s examination of the Oireachtas sub-committee dealing with the issue in the months before Mr. Ahern’s announcement makes it clear that mitigation of the financial and legal responsibility of the State was the driving force rather than any concern to see that justice was done to, or help brought to ex-pupils.

103

104
  ‘The Irish Gulag:’ see above

105
  As a homeless 17 year old, a victim of childhood incest and an ex-inmate of orphanages, and a psychiatric hospital, she had turned to him for help. He had been physically abusive and had forced her to give up their first child for adoption

106
  Tried on multiple charges at the age of 89 in 2004, when the court learned that the first complaint against him had been made in 1939 but that he had not been removed from contact with children in an institution for children with learning disabilities, run by the Brothers of Charity, until 1984.

107
  Stripped of his ministry, he later became a teacher at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in Washington.

108
  Essentially the same issue behind the conflict between Thomas a Becket and Henry II of England in 1162 C.E.

109
  At the suggestion of the Church & General Insurance Company, after it had taken legal opinion on the matter.

110
  See above, pages..

111
 
Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel
, Michael Harris

112
  There were, she said other cases being taken before the civil courts, but she did not distinguish between whether these applied to the Cavan school or to the order’s private orphanage in Harold’s Cross.

113
  We altered not only the names of all the ex-pupils, but of the nuns—except those known to be dead or who were identified during the proceedings of the Inquiry into the fire. Sister Patricia’s use of the word ‘complaint’ is an interesting legalism. Readers will have noted that what the women we interviewed did was to describe their childhood experiences. They were not making formal complaints—if for no other reason than that at that time there was no concept of, or process for making them.