Madam, - Dr Michael Corry's letter of May 19th highlighted many of the reasons why I took the decision to go on hunger strike for 22 days in April 2004.
I read his letter with keen interest and waited in hope to read replies from the professional bodies involved with survivors of abuse in relation to the Redress Board. I expected replies from Dr Corry's professional colleagues - psychiatrists who, like him, attend the Redress Board, where some of them have had their professional integrity undermined.
I hoped to read letters from survivors' solicitors and barristers. These professional people have witnessed at first hand what Dr Corry outlines in his letter, ie the humiliation and intimidation visited on their clients when they appear in front of the board. I expected letters from survivor's counsellors, who listen to their clients tell of their degrading experiences in an atmosphere that renders many of them too frightened to talk.
Alas, Dr Corry is a lone voice among the above-mentioned professional bodies. Questions arise. Are these professional people sworn to a similar kind of secrecy to that demanded of survivors when they sign to accept the financial pittance offered to them for the drip-feed devastation of their childhoods and the brokenness they continue to suffer in their adult lives? Is it a case of "Terms and conditions apply"? Is there another layer of reasons for the professional people's silent response to Dr Corry's letter?
I feel I talk for many survivors when I say: my entire life has been blighted by the abuse I experienced in my childhood. When a person's childhood is systematically abused, day upon day, year upon year, be the abuse emotional or physical, a person's entire humanity is abused; no part of a person's integrity escapes this degradation.
We survivors of institutional abuse, whose childhoods were annihilated, are today's broken adults. We survive in a state of continuous bewilderment; we are drifting, to quote Dr Corry, "from one crisis to another", in hope that somehow, somewhere, some day the atrocities committed against us as children might begin to make sense.
However, there is one way to protect survivors from further abuse by the Redress Board. This one way is for the professional bodies mentioned in this letter to join Dr Corry in his struggle to bring about change in the tyrannical atmosphere that prevails in the board at present.
The above mentioned professional people have one kind of power. The power to insist - indeed they have a moral duty to demand - that their clients, survivors of institutional abuse, be afforded the respect and dignity denied them as children.
Maybe then the Goddess Themis will smile on her scales of right and justice, as they begin to balance with dignity and respect for one section of the most vulnerable adults in Irish society today.
On behalf of all survivors of institutional abuse, I would like to thank Dr Corry for the compassion and heartfelt concern he shows for us all in his letter. - Yours, etc,
TOM SWEENEY, Drumcairn Avenue, Fettercairn, Dublin 24.