“The Ryan report is the most disturbing document to be published since the foundation of the Irish State. It causes us to question the quality of our Christianity and reflect on the deficiencies of our democracy. The complacent veil of unknowing has been lifted, no obfuscation or excuses are possible now.” 
Fr Kevin Hegarty THE POET, William Butler Yeats, served as a senator in the 1920’s. New to fatherhood himself, he made several significant contributions on the education of children.
He informed his speeches by visits to primary schools which he found, in the main, dark, cramped and unsanitary. He believed that schools should be centres of civilisation and that the imaginative cultivation of the mind of the child must be the object of education. School buildings should make a statement about the value of the child in the community. They should be bright, open and attractive. Teachers should be obliged to record in books any punishments administered. These books should be made available to school inspectors for inspection.
The gulf between Yeats’ aspirations and reality is clearly reflected in Judge Sean Ryan’s report on child abuse in industrial schools, those Celtic gulags where thousands of children, orphaned, abandoned or convicted of petty theft, were incarcerated up to the 1970’s.
After reading the newspaper account of the report I turned, once again, to John McGahern’s short story, ‘The Recruiting Officer’. McGahern, in his short stories and novels, evokes the moral and spiritual atmosphere of rural Ireland in the early decades of the Irish State.
‘The Recruiting Officer’ is a quietly terrifying story set in a drab school in Leitrim. The action centres on the visit to the school of the manager, Canon Reilly, where he confronts a young boy, whom he calls only by his surname of Walsh, with taking money from the church poor box.
Having extracted a confession from the boy, “much as a dog shakes the life out of a rat”, he offers him the choice of either accepting punishment from him or of taking the matter to the Gardaí which might result in him being taken to an industrial school.
The boy opts for what he hopes will be the lesser of two evils. Canon Reilly takes an electric wire from his pocket and beats him vigorously around the legs until he falls on the floor, sobbing hysterically.
The story is a microcosm of the world of horror revealed in the Ryan report; the oppressive power of the clergy; the cynical acquiescence of the school principal who fears the manager; the air of violence and sexual repression that hangs over the afternoon like a dark cumulus.
Ironically, the story concludes with the arrival of a Christian Brother, the recruiting officer of the title, who speaks to the senior boys about the possibility of some of them joining the order when they leave national school.
I first heard of Letterfrack Industrial School as a five-year-old boy in my first class. An awesome nun presided over us. She told us that, unless we were good, we would be sent to the Galway school. She described it as a place of great torment. She also gave us her vision of hell. There did not seem to be much difference.
In his poem, ‘Letterfrack Industrial School’, Richard Murphy evokes its reality:
“Podded in varnished pews, stunted in beds
Of cruciform iron, they bruise with sad, hurt shame:
Orphans with felons, bastards at loggerheads
With waifs, branded for life by a bad name.”
The Ryan report is the most disturbing document to be published since the foundation of the Irish State. It causes us to question the quality of our Christianity and reflect on the deficiencies of our democracy. The complacent veil of unknowing has been lifted, no obfuscation or excuses are possible now. Sadly the truth seems to have been dragged out of the religious congregations responsible for perpetrating the abuses. According to the 2003 interim report: “In the main respondents have adopted an adversarial, defensive and legalistic approach... doing no more than complying with their statutory obligations and doing so reluctantly in the case of some respondents, and under protest in the case of others.”
In sober prose and with cumulative detail the Ryan report reveals a dark hinterland which we have failed to acknowledge or name until now. There were over 800 known abusers in over 200 institutions during a period of 35 years.
The adjectives used in the report are stark and compelling. Abuse was systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary and endemic. Abuse was not a failure of the system. Abuse was the system.
Madeline Bunting summed it up well in her Guardian article last Friday: “The Ryan report’s meticulous gathering of evidence paints a picture of a system of church and state in Ireland that was horrifically dysfunctional in its combination of sadism and deference. Squarely in the frame are the religious orders who protected and tolerated their members’ actions even when they knew they were breaking the law. But also culpable is the state charged to inspect children’s homes and schools. It was too deferential to the Catholic Church to ever do the job properly.”
The Catholic Church will have to reflect thoroughly, and without equivocation on the Ryan report if it hopes to regain credibility as a moral voice in Ireland. It has to confront the legacy of religious authoritarianism and cliquish clericalism that helped cause and cover up the scandal of the industrial schools. Madeline Bunting, a practising Catholic, wondered how long she can hang on in a church that seems so immune to meaningful reform. I know the feeling, Madeline.
