A nine-year investigation into child abuse by Irish Catholic institutions has revealed a system that protected child molesters and trapped thousands of poor Irish children in an abusive environment for six decades. On top of the lack of adequate food and clothing, nuns and priests regularly beat, raped and humiliated children. Most of the 35,000 victims were sent to the residential schools where the abuses took place because they were deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families. 

 

Despite exposing the abuse, the findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions. The Christian Brothers, the religious order at the center of the abuse charges, successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. The victims are furious that their abusers will not be held accountable, and many feel cheated out of justice. 

 

"I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed," said Christine Buckley, 62, who spent her first 18 years in a Dublin orphanage run by Sisters of Mercy nuns.

 

"I would have never opened my wounds if I'd known this was going to be the end result,” said John Walsh, of Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, who added that he felt "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions.

 

The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, has said that anyone responsible for abusing children in Catholic-run institutions should be held to account and he was "profoundly sorry" for the abuse, but it is unclear whether or not he intends to move to overturn the legal ruling suppressing the names.

-Angela Chen

 

Irish Abused “Cheated of Justice” (BBC)

Catholic Church Says Abusers Must Be Held to Account (The Australian)

Critics: Ireland Slow to Protect its Children (by Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press)

Ireland (AllGov)