The file on the Ryan report cannot be closed until the guilty are brought to justice and made face the full rigours of the law for their abuse and neglect, Beverley Flynn TD has said.
Speaking on the Dáil debate on the Ryan report, she said those identified of such heinous crimes are not deserving of the cloak of anonymity given to them.
“They must be brought to justice. We owe it to the survivors, but we owe it even more to those who did not survive, those who lived and died without identity or name, who lie buried in unmarked graves or who endured adult years of torment and grief. And not because of anything they did, but because of what was done to them.”
Dep Flynn said that while the report is about the abuse perpetrated by the religious orders, by men and women who shamelessly betrayed the vows they had taken, we must also remember that those awful deeds did not happen in isolation or without the knowledge of many others.
“In every local community, Letterfrack or Daingean, Artane or Kilkenny, people knew what was going on. Doctors and gardaí and tradesmen and shopkeepers and teachers and social workers and local clergy all knew. All had to know. And all kept the silence,” she said.
Dep Flynn said that to understand how such a situation was allowed to develop, we must look at the relationship between the State and the Church. She said the situation arose because of the policy of placing our basic educational and health services, funded as they were by the taxpayer, under the sole control of the Church.
“And that is what the Ryan report boils down to – control,” she said. “It was a control which came to be unquestioned, which led to blatant abuse of power, and which allowed the religious institutions to behave as if they were above the law, unaccountable then, and still unaccountable.
“The end result was that the protectors became the persecutors, sadism replaced sympathy and kindness, fear and exploitation became the norm. What comes across most forcefully in the Ryan report is the repeated refusal of the congregations to accept collective responsibility. Even when forced to acknowledge the catalogue of wrongdoing in one institution after another, the congregations still flatly refuse to make an admission of collective guilt,” she said.
Dep Flynn said that all of this neglect and abuse was carried out with the passive collusion of the State. “Ryan says that the failure of the Department of Education to control the excesses in these institutions was an acknowledgement by the State of the ascendancy of the congregations and their ownership of the system. The deference shown by the State to the congregations was the green light for them to do as they wished without the fear of stricture. The Department knew about, and ignored, breaches of the code of corporal punishment.
“The Department investigated allegations of sexual abuse, confirmed the abuse, dismissed the abusers, but never reported to the gardaí. Complaints by parents to the Department of Education were ignored. Young girls were sexually abused by foster parents, holiday families, employers, visitors, but were powerless to express their pain and torment.”
Dep Flynn said that the file cannot be closed until the law has taken its full course, and those found guilty are brought to justice.
