The Christian Brothers may have much to be proud of, but we must not allow what happened at Artane to be obscured, writes Diarmaid Ferriter
Last Thursday, giving evidence before the Investigation Committee of the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, Brother Michael Reynolds, a senior leader of the Christian Brothers, defended the record of Artane Industrial School. He insisted that, in the main, it was a "positive institution" which had undeservedly received negative media coverage.
He challenged the idea that his community had engaged in cover-ups and suggested there was an inadequate understanding of sexual abuse in the 1930s and 1940s and ignorance about the long-term psychological damage caused by it.
His comments will have angered many who suffered in Artane and the industrial school system. Brother Reynolds said he did not understand a letter written to the provincial of the Christian Brothers in 1938, which maintained that the person who had abused a child "was more to be pitied than censured".
It will have been obvious to everyone else what it meant - that no action would be taken against abusers - and Brother Reynolds did himself, his community and their victims a disservice last week.
The Christian Brothers were aware of child abuse well before 1938. In 1920, the superior general of the Christian Brothers in Ireland informed members of the order that "the fondling of boys, the laying of our hands upon them is contrary to the rules of modesty and decidedly dangerous".
Fintan O'Toole quoted that letter in this newspaper in 1996. Governments in the early years of the State were also aware of the abuse of children. The Carrigan Committee, established by the government in June 1930 to investigate juvenile prostitution, heard evidence from Garda commissioner Eoin O'Duffy, in which he highlighted the prevalence of the sexual abuse of girls under 14 and suggested only 25 per cent of cases were being reported. The report of the committee was suppressed because of its depiction of a society with declining moral values and the State's distrust of the validity of evidence heard from children.
Last week Brother Reynolds also maintained that "the most serious documented case of physical abuse" involved a boy who had his arm broken and he acknowledged that the Christian Brothers had handled that case badly.
This, presumably, was a reference to a case that received attention outside of the institution, a rare occurrence. The reason it was highlighted was because it was brought up in the Dáil in April 1954, due to the efforts of the victim's family and TD Peadar Cowan's insistence on raising the subject with minister for education Seán Moylan.
The victim's mother had been refused permission to see her son, who was in hospital after a 21-year-old Christian Brother had viciously beaten him with a sweeping brush. Cowan was at pains to stress that he thought very highly of the Christian Brothers, but he wanted an assurance that punishment would be inflicted by persons of experience and responsibility.
Moylan sought to downplay the incident as an accident and to exonerate the Christian Brothers of any wrongdoing:
"I cannot conceive any deliberate ill-treatment of boys by a community motivated by the ideals of its founder. I cannot conceive any sadism emanating from men who were trained to have devotion to a very high purpose. The point is that accidents happen in the best-regulated families and in this family there are about 800 boys.
"These boys are difficult to control. At times maybe it is essential that children should be punished. This is an isolated incident; it can only happen again as an accident."
Moylan's contribution highlighted that the State was not going to countenance any serious scrutiny of what was going on in these schools, and that publicly there would be no question of criticising the Christian Brothers.
They were given State funds and carte blanche to do whatever they wanted behind closed doors. This is what allowed the industrial school system to go unchallenged until the late 1960s. The idea that what happened in April 1954 was an isolated incident beggars belief; without doubt, there were countless vicious beatings that never received any publicity.
The brothers did keep a lid on abuse; sometimes moved the perpetrators from institution to institution, and the State connived by turning a blind eye, including ignoring the graphic reports of Anna McCabe, the State's medical inspector of the industrial schools, who documented conditions of near starvation, and wrote of there being "no human interest whatsoever in the children".
This is not to suggest that most of the brothers were abusive. Even those who were incarcerated in the institutions have been generous in their assessment of their mentors (and sometimes tormentors).
Former inmate, Patrick Touher, in his book Fear of the Collar, referred to the impact of the violence of "those bastards who wore a collar under the cloak of a Christian Brother"; but he also acknowledged that most of the brothers "were doing their best, within limited circumstances, in hard times and with frightening numbers. They had no luxury, nothing to look forward to except more of the same."
The Christian Brothers can be proud of their enormous contribution to Irish society and the education of children, but the contention that Artane, or indeed any industrial school, was "a positive institution" in 20th-century Ireland cannot go unchallenged.
Diarmaid Ferriter lectures in Irish history at St Patrick's College, DCU, and is author of The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (Profile Books)