These are some predawn reflections written in Dublin, the morning after Mark Ryans Memorial service. I also attended Mark's funeral and cremation in London, last week, as I live in London at present.
David (left), Mark (right) during their appearance and testimony on The Late Late Show November 2022.
Why should it be the Survivors task to be ‘courageous’, ‘brave’, ‘generous’?
I am among the number of still living Survivors of Irish Catholic and Protestant and Secular Boarding Schools. One of many. One of many thousands still living today. The dead number in tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, if we start the count at the inception of the Irish State, when the De Valera Government that inherited a colonial Victorian ‘Christian’ social care, education and health care system handed it over to the Catholic Church, providing them with immense social power and solid flow of income, which they ably exploited. God needs our money, it would seem. And He needs laws as well.
The very first official report into abuse of children within those care systems was The Carrigan Report of 1931. The suppression of that report aligned with the view that Catholic morality should be the basis of the legal approach to morality. The Church was beyond reproach. This was official state policy.
I am a Survivor. One of many. Ireland has had how many public inquiries already?
And only now is the matter of the abuse of vulnerable children in Boarding Schools and Day Schools since the 1930s on the legal, political and social agenda in the public domain.
How did this come about?
In 2020/21, a group of past pupils of one fee paying boarding school, Blackrock College, Dublin, started an online group discussing how to get their College to issue a public apology to Survivors, as there had been over the last two decades or so a number of cases that had been through the courts, where perpetrators were held to account, but without a formal public apology being issued from the College itself.
A number of Survivors had been trying to get a decent response from The Spiritans for more than a decade, to no avail, in spite of strenuous effort, notably by Mark Vincent Healy, a powerhouse in this field, and others. It is a Sisyphean task, and needs many bodies to the wheel.
This most recent approach, where survivors and past pupils started conversing about this for the first time as an online group, opened a path for more Survivors to reveal their sad histories, and the realisation quickly grew that the numbers of children afflicted was way beyond anyones comprehension - an avalanche of allegations emerged, just from one short period, less than a decade, with 20% of children from one year saying how they had been afflicted, which led to Survivors making formal complaints to Irish Police forces.
It was at this point when it looked like the College was still stonewalling that David and Mark Ryan, having bumped into a radio documentary maker, almost by accident, determined that they were going to finally break the story to the Nation of Ireland which they did via the RTE Broadcast Radio documentary 'Blackrock Boys' and on TV, in November 2022 with an appearance on The Late Late Show, Irelands premier Saturday night chat show, a cultural institution much loved and respected across Ireland, and indeed across the Earth wherever Irish diaspora find themselves. That documentary has just this weekend won a major award in Europe for its makers.
Then there was 6 days of Joe Duffy, a radio talk show host, who ran 6 consecutive two hour shows on the matter, because there were that many Survivors coming forward with well corroborated allegations, which were quite horrific - the numbers of children and the brutality of their persecutors was finally being recognised, as was the cover ups. The College had always sought to protect its image, status and wealth above the needs of the children who were harmed in their care. They moved predators to other areas, where they continued to predate, creating a trail of tears that ran across continents. A pattern repeated almost everywhere Catholic clergy ran care systems of any kind,
The nation was appalled, and the Government was impelled by this publicity to acquiesce to forming a Public Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse within Irish Boarding and Day Schools, secular and religious alike.
The Ryan brothers were central to all of this. Their initial testimony provided the impetus for others to step forward into the light.
The Government has since then been running a Survivor Scoping Inquiry to gather information and insight from the Survivors who had come forwards, around 200 or so now elderly men, to feed into the future public inquiry. Mark, David and many, many others have been interviewed in depth about their experiences and what they want to see in a Public Inquiry. We all felt there was a great work to be done, and we were all prepared to do that work, whatever it might take.
And then Mark passed away, unexpectedly on September 21st 2023, and his obituary gives an indication of the importance of what he and his brother David did. Historic is the accurate term to use.
David and Marks close family and friends were not expecting this - indeed Mark was preparing for the long slog that a Public Inquiry entails. We all were. We were bereft when we got the news of his death. Mark was a warm, big hearted, kind gentle man. His aim was not revenge, it was justice - the justice that grounded love demands - for all Survivors, living and deceased.
Speaking to one of Marks survivor friends, he told me that Mark said to him : "We should never have become friends!" and what he meant was it was the shared injustice, the harm and trauma of being predated upon within a setting that gave the predators carte blanche and a protective veil to continue abusing children that had 'thrown us together'.
At the funeral and memorial, much was said of Marks courage, to take on the most powerful institutions in the way he was envisaging it. We all knew it was going to be a struggle, a fight, a matter that might well wear us down, again and again.
Yesterday I asked myself “Why do we have to fight for justice?”
Why fight? Why us? Why me? This is not self pity, it is a really good question.
Why must we - the harmed - take up a struggle against Institutions of great wealth and power to see to it that our stories are told and understood, to see to it that those who were culpable are held to account, to see to it that they make appropriate reparations, to see to it that we receive the support we need as we arrive at elderhood, (is that a word?), to see to it that this country creates a social care system that nurtures the most vulnerable among us, to see to it that we build a society that nurtures all of us, from in utero to the grave?
Why must we fight? Why is this a struggle? Why are we so often on our own?
Why is it that Adult Survivors of childhood abuse, survivors of violent rape, survivors of daily psychological torture, survivors of physical beatings, survivors of deliberate neglect of such degree and quantity that it can be fairly called an atrocity, are expected to be courageous, generous, or brave and take up that task outlined above?
Why is it that we old men, all of us ordinary people who were just small innocent children whose real needs went unmet, because we were groomed, bullied, beaten, broken, shattered, splattered, torn, raped and shredded and so grossly mistreated in such unspeakable manner within institutional ‘care’ systems, and schools, in ways that scarred and mashed our souls and warped our core sense of self out of all recognition, twisting our hearts and breaking our minds, our guts wrenched in pain and terror, our sleep punctuated by night sweats and terrors, our days polluted by rage and despair, living in fear of the next day, trauma reverberations distorting our lives forever, are expected to be courageous, generous, brave and why are we the ones who have to fight for justice?
Why are we alone, in Society? Are we not a significant demographic already?
Where are you? Where were you then and where are you now?
What is it then when so many of us are indeed kind, gentle men and also broken, broken, broken and holding that within ourselves, that we have to take up this gargantuan task, often on our own?
Colm O'Gorman was in that position decades ago, in 1998. He knows.
What kind of culture expected us to keep calm, and carry on?
Why is it that we cannot rail and scream and cry and be heard, recognised, validated and be protected?
Why is it that the Church and State, the institutions that operated, funded and exploited those care systems are not expected to be courageous, brave, generous let alone honest?
What is it, that you expect the Church and State to be defensive.
’It’s only to be expected.’ ‘
What else do you expect?’
Restorative Justice? Before any real or meaningful justice has been achieved?
Really?
Why has every cohort of children abused within institutional settings who survived into adulthood had to struggle with both Church and State, and the wider community, to gain public recognition of what was done?
Industrial Schools, Orphanages, Mothers and Babies Homes, Magdalene Launderies, Mental Asylums, Boarding Schools, Day Schools.
What does that say about Irish society, Irish culture and Irish history?
What does this say about you and I?
What is that?
What is that all about?
Why is it that both Church and State are expected to be defensive, dishonest and not expected to be humble, generous, courageous and kind?
Why must we fight for justice?
Why?
What happened did not happen - it was done to us.
What happens to a child when he is tormented by a depraved, violent nasty adult?
What happens to a child when he is repeatedly tormented by a depraved, violent nasty adult and no one listens, hears or understands, and that child has to carry that terror and pain in silence, unprotected, alone, as he lives on, day by day, fearing the next day, every day.
What happens when the detail of that child's experience is so unspeakable that the child himself cannot describe it and does not want to remember any of it - what happens for the child afterwards?
What happens to a child when he or she is tormented by a depraved, violent nasty adult and no one listens, hears or understands, when no one steps in to defend the child, to protect the child from the depraved and violent adult and it happens within a care system, and that child has to carry that terror in silence, alone, as he or she lives on, day by day?
Do you know what it is to live only because you find yourself alive, numbed to the core, unable to live for anything? That is not resilience.
What happens when the child tries to speak of what was done to him or her and no one wants to hear of it? What happens to the adult Survivor when he tries to speak and no one wants to hear of it?
What happens when this desperate thing is institutionalised, when this level of mistreatment is systemic across a country, within the governance of a State, paid for by taxes?
What happens when this is done for decades, afflicting generations of children?
An action is taken, a thing is done, harm is caused and no one intervenes and there are aftershocks, outcomes, reverberations - none of them good or healthy.
How many children endured this, how many attempted to live on only to die early, broken beyond coping - how many survivors did not survive long? They are invisible, vanished. The dead do not speak to the living. They cannot fight for justice. They will never receive justice.
The living cannot speak to the dead, only to each other, and still be heard.
What happens to a generation of children when a significant number of us are tormented by depraved, violently nasty adults and no one listens, hears or understands, when no one steps in to defend those children, to protect the children from known depraved, violent adults and it happens within a care system, repeatedly, and those children have to carry that terror and their interior wounded state in silence, often unknown to each other, alone in a crowded room, as they live on, day by day?
What happens to them when they in turn become parents, and find themselves struggling with their next generation of children, unable to respond naturally, openly, unable to meet their needs, having lived with their needs as children unmet.
Do you know what it is like to be that child, growing into a teen, becoming an adult, carrying that toxic load in silence, trying to live well, flailing and failing?
Who indeed needs to be brave, courageous and generous?
Who needs to put their hand up, and who should admit to what was done - not ‘what happened’ - but what was done to so many little children. What was done quite deliberately - who needs to put their hand up for that?
Church and State and people protected Church and State and people, and they all knew this was being done.
We are not victims. We were victimised.
Theres a crucial difference between the two statements.
I don’t want to fight for justice. I want justice. I’m tired, exhausted, breaking. We are tired, exhausted, breaking. Thousands upon thousands of us, our needs as children unmet, our needs as adult survivors unmet.
Why must we fight for justice?
Why do you, even still, forsake us so?
Corneilius
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