Letter sent by email to Irish Government and others regards Public Inquiry into Historical Abuse within Boarding and Day Schools - meeting unmet needs.
To whom it may concern,
The unmet needs of children deprived of their human rights, their dignity and safety permeate their lives. Their lives are live within the community. The adverse impacts in terms of human distress, ill-health percolates and permeates, wearing the survivor down, and until those needs are fully met, those percolations continue. A bitter brew, one that does not bring pleasure to life. Quite the opposite.
Mark Vincent Healy writes :
"To have lived a life tormented from the start, and left this world never knowing any peace of it, is as much part of the culture which failed to protect those children as the culture which allowed such evil to prosper for all those decades. How can one even begin to say sorry to the lives who endured such torment, to the lives of those families who witnessed such torment in their loved ones."
The immensity of the suffering precludes apology followed by horse trading and mitigation. Honest and full acknowledgement of the part State and Church and Culture played, remorse, a social and material concern to meet the unmet needs of survivors, and their families, and a cultural shift that makes society safe for all our children.
Mark continues:
"In many ways, the response is already late, far too late, for those no longer with us, but we can make amends and ‘do right’ by those who remain. In many ways, it is the only conscionable and compassionate act available to a tardy response by a church and state to those victims still with us, who deserved far better, if we are not a nation that ought to collectively hang our heads in shame for such failures to our own, to our own children."
What this means to me, or how I interpret this is that the Survivors story has profound historical importance, on many levels. Matters of governance, probity, health and education, social policy, development, economics and international relations are entwined. Not least because it involved harm to so many children, to men and to women, a significant demographic within a nation. So much pain and distress that could have been avoided.
I think it is fair to suggest here, say, as a Survivor, speaking for myself, that Ireland as a Nation, a people, a community, a society is at a turning point here.
Will the people of Ireland bear the honest truth about this, from the assumption of Independence, in 1922, to the present period, and will they will their Government to ensure the unmet needs of the surviving children are fully met?
Only then will the history be complete and accurate.
To those who are in Governance, I say this.
Honesty brings justice. Empathy matures power towards equity. Leave a legacy of healing, gift the future with it by taking action in the present.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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