The secretary general of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Mr Tim Dalton, said yesterday a colleague told him in 1989 that children in some residential institutions had been abused physically in a systematic way involving humiliation. Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent, reports.
Mr Dalton said a principal officer at the Department, the deceased Mr Dick Crowe, said that when he (Mr Crowe) worked with the Kennedy committee, which investigated the institutions between 1967 and 1970, they came across institutions where children were being punished, not at the time of a misdemeanour, but were later gathered on a stairway,were made to strip off, and were then beaten.
Mr Dalton was giving evidence to the investigation committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in Dublin yesterday.
Later yesterday the committee was told by Father Joe O'Reilly, provincial of the Rosminian Institute of Charity in Ireland, that when corporal punishment was banned in 1982, the Attorney General advised it did not extend to industrial schools.
Father O'Reilly said his order had sought such advice. The order managed St Joseph's industrial school at Clonmel, Co Tipperary; St Patrick's industrial school at Upton, Co Cork, which closed as an industrial school in 1966; and St Joseph's school for the visually impaired at Drumcondra in Dublin. Father O'Reilly said that in 1979 a member was expelled from the order within weeks of allegations of sex abuse being made against him by three boys at St Joseph's in Clonmel.
Psychiatric help was organised for the accused man and for the boys, while the Department of Education and other authorities were informed, he said.
There was another allegation against another member of the order some time later that year, he added.
In 1990, Father James Flynn, now the order's superior general in Rome but then its provincial in Ireland, apologised for the treatment of boys at "old Ferryhouse" (St Joseph's in Clonmel).
Speaking at the opening of a refurbished St Joseph's that year, in the company of then minister for education, Ms O'Rourke, and then ceann comhairle, Mr Seán Treacy, Father Flynn said the regime at the old school had been of "extreme severity, even brutality" and asked, on behalf of the order, for forgiveness.
Father O'Reilly said that through the 1990s, as more and more survivors came forward, the order had to accept that there "were children who were abused in our institutions in the past". Sexual and physical abuse were involved, at St Joseph's Clonmel mainly, he said, while things were "not as clear" at Upton.
Through the 1990s also, the order began apologising for this, mainly through the media, and then in a formal public apology in 1999, he said. They had to accept "there was quite an amount of truth in what people were saying to us, perhaps even more than we knew at that stage".
He said the order agreed to contribute to the Government redress scheme "guided by the maxim 'do no more harm'."