Sir, - Fintan O'Toole (May 21st) says that at a childcare seminar in 1971, after the publication of the Kennedy Report, two civil servants who represented the Departments of Justice and Education were called into a private meeting with Bishop Casey and Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy. I represented the Department of Justice on the Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools Systems, chaired by the late District Justice Eileen Kennedy, between 1967 and 1970.
Maybe three times in over 30 years, I have been present at functions in which Sr. Stanislaus participated. We have never met and we have never spoken, person to person. We did not meet personally, nor did we speak to one another, at a Kennedy Report seminar in Killarney in 1971. During that seminar, neither Bishop Eamon Casey nor Sr. Stanislaus herself invited me to - much less called me into - a private meeting, to express criticism of the Report. In alleging that they did, Mr O'Toole's article adds a further hurt, to the many - in my opinion, undeserved - hurtfulnesses which Sr. Stanislaus has had to endure recently. The Irish Times ought to make amends for misrepresenting her.
At Bishop Casey's request, my Department asked me to attend this seminar, hosted by him. The sessions were chaired by the late Mr Vincent Grogan. Sr. Stanislaus contributed. I can recall her commenting, in open session - and several others later reiterated her comment - that the Report "damned with faint praise" the religious, who although they originally undertook conduct of these schools, when the public authorities of the time refused, had, nevertheless, always been seriously under-funded and under-resourced by public authorities, who ought have done otherwise. Her right, and the right of others, to maintain this contention and to express it must be acknowledged.
On the second day of the seminar, I took the initiative of speaking privately, for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, to Bishop Casey and to Mr Grogan jointly. Sr. Stanislaus was not aware that I was doing so and she was not present. The person who had represented the Department of Education was not aware either, nor was he present.
My conversation with Bishop Casey and Mr Grogan related to "faint praise" being neither the burden, the purpose nor the thrust of the Report and the emphasis at the seminar on "faint praise" not reflecting at all how the recommendations of the Report strove to overcome a historical legacy of shortcomings in the residential care of children in the schools. - Yours, etc., Risteard Mac Conchradha,
An Charraig Dhubh, Co Atha Cliath.