The first and most appropriate response to the report of the Murphy Inquiry into child sexual abuse in swimming must be to express heartfelt sympathy to the victims, their parents and families. The pain suffered by so many young children as they participated in the sport will endure long after the political controversy stirred by the scandal subsides.
If anything, the scale of the abuse was even more widespread and more systematic than was feared. The 161-page Murphy report presents the most appalling catalogue of physical and psychological abuse in the sport over almost a quarter-century. Children did not come forward to complain because they came to believe that it formed part of their normal training regime; the gratification of an adult took precedence over the joy of the young swimmer. The children, their parents and their families were betrayed by the Irish Amateur Swimming Association (IASA), Derry O'Rourke, George Gibney, and possibly others, who stood in loco parentis.
Dr Murphy is to be commended for the manner in which he has managed to uncover the full extent of the abuse in a swift and effective manner. It is clear that the law must now take its course. The Garda and the DPP must decide whether the evidence of further abuse warrants criminal charges. The victims will want to pursue, and are fully entitled to pursue, compensation claims through the courts.
A more immediate question is whether State funding for the IASA, suspended by Dr McDaid in February, should be restored. Dr Murphy makes the case for increased public funding. But the case against the IASA is much stronger. The organisation was guilty of what the Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Dr McDaid, terms "ineptitude, inadequacy" . . . and a total "systems failure." In all the circumstances there can be no question of State support for an organisation, which as current constituted, is guilty of the most serious dereliction of duty.
That said, the innocent must not suffer with the guilty. Swimming is a natural and healthy sport, richly deserving of support from the taxpayer. The onus is on all of those involved in the administration of the sport to show that new guidelines are in place and that the lessons of the darkest chapter in the history of Irish swimming have been absorbed.
There are also lessons for the Government. The swimming scandal is by no means the first in which those who became aware of abuse were frustrated and undermined as they attempted to bring it to the notice of the authorities. It may be that a system of mandatory reporting might have helped; the concerns of parents may have been treated more seriously by officials if the IASA had been obliged to report all complaints and suspicions to the Eastern Health Board. The difficulty in this case, however, was that the defensive approach of the IASA formed part of the problem.
There is a better alternative: with every such case of systematic abuse, the argument for some kind of genuinely independent social services inspectorate, becomes more persuasive. Such an inspectorate could be empowered to investigate such cases on receipt of complaints from the public or on the recommendation of the relevant minister and/or government department. This kind of inspectorate is already in place in Northern Ireland. It is long past time that a similar agency was established in the Republic.