Born a few years before Pope Francis, Michael O’Brien, who also died this week, will be remembered for his appearance on RTÉ’s Questions and Answers current affairs programme in May 2009. As an audience member, he spoke powerfully and agonisingly of the physical and sexual abuse he experienced in Ferryhouse industrial school near Clonmel, Co Tipperary, run by the Rosminians. The hurt dripped from him as his testimony detailed a family torn apart, a childhood ruined and a life haunted by nightmares.
One of 13 children, after O’Brien’s mother died in 1942 he was taken by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children “on a scut truck” to court in Clonmel. The siblings were sent to different institutions and “there was nothing my father could do”. Two nights after he arrived in Ferryhouse, he was raped. “Our only crime against the State was that we were poor and had no mother,” he recalled.
Although O’Brien met his wife Mary when he was aged 18, he did not tell her about the abuse until 1999. He also spoke of a suicide attempt after spending five days at the Ryan Commission inquiry into child abuse, a stark reminder of the renewed trauma that reliving these experiences could spark.
As an elected politician and Fianna Fáil mayor of Clonmel from 1993-1994, O’Brien’s was an unusual victim’s voice, but his demand was a consistent one from many victims: “the government and the religious orders must not do anything now without consulting us”.
Amid the tributes paid to the late pope, it is fitting that O’Brien is remembered generously too. The personal experience he outlined was part of the reason Pope Francis’s visit to Ireland in 2018 was so different from the previous Irish papal visit in 1979. Thousands turned out for a “Stand 4 Truth” protest in the Garden of Remembrance in 2018 to coincide with the pope’s Phoenix Park Mass.
When speaking at the outset of the papal visit, then-taoiseach Leo Varadkar eschewed the fawning tone of 1979 while Francis looked on. Varadkar referred to “failures of both church and State, and wider society” that “created a bitter and broken heritage for so many, leaving a legacy of pain and suffering. It is a history of sorrow and shame ... stains on our State, our society and also the Catholic church.”
The warm glow around the Francis obsequies this week should not obliterate those stains or the enduring relevance of O’Brien’s experiences and the trauma abuse victims continue to endure. Varadkar insisted in 2018 there was still “much to be done to bring about justice and truth and healing for victims and survivors ... We must now ensure that from words flow actions.” That speech remains relevant for Ireland and the Vatican.
O’Brien’s insistence in 2009 that victims be made central has hardly been honoured to anything like the extent required. Shortly before the death of Francis, for example, the report compiled by Sheila Nunan, the independent negotiator appointed by government to liaise with religious organisations over financial redress, revealed that only two of eight religious bodies linked to mother and baby homes have offered to contribute to a survivor redress scheme.
What went on in Ferryhouse was known before O’Brien bared his trauma. In 1990, the Rosminian provincial Fr James Flynn was unambiguous: “The greatest guilt has to be borne by those of us who utilised or condoned or ignored the extreme severity, even brutality which characterised at times the regime at Ferryhouse.”
Yet even a quarter of a century later during the pontificate of Francis, and after an avalanche of evidence of abuse, the Vatican prized its power over its responsibilities and culpability. True, Francis met victims, listened to them, and appealed for forgiveness. He summoned bishops to tell them survivors deserved “concrete and efficient measures”. But the self-serving bureaucracy was still allowed to choke transparency.
Marie Collins, a victim of clerical sex abuse in Ireland in 1960, and appointed a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors established by Francis in 2014, resigned in 2017 over what she regarded as a “shameful” lack of co-operation. The commission was incorporated into the Roman Curia, the Holy See’s all-too-powerful government. In 2022, Francis was still pleading for a “reliable account on what is presently being done and what needs to change” in relation to child abuse and its survivors.
O’Brien railed against the non-disclosure agreements victims were faced with as part of the redress process and decried the indemnities given to religious orders in return for patently inadequate contributions. Ultimately, what he was looking for was reflected in the name of the group he chaired: “Right to Peace”. That finding such peace was made so difficult for so many should also be recorded as part of the legacy of Francis’s pontificate.
