Not asking questions could again fail children

In 1971, after the publication of the Kennedy Report calling for the abolition of the industrial school system, the then Bishop of Kerry, Eamonn Casey, hosted a childcare seminar in Killarney. Two civil servants who had represented the Departments of Justice and Education on the Kennedy committee were there. Both were called into a private meeting with the bishop and Sister Stanislaus Kennedy in which the report was strongly criticised for its failure to acknowledge the great work of the religious orders. The orders, they were told, were being damned with faint praise from secular administrators who were trying to muscle in on this area.

There is always, in any society, a natural tendency to defend and protect good people. That is why many left-wingers and liberals, Liz McManus and David Norris among them, have since the ground-breaking States of Fear programme rushed to defend Sister Stanislaus Kennedy in the controversy that has arisen over her alleged awareness of child abuse in Kilkenny in the 1970s. The vital work she has done in fighting poverty and homelessness makes people who support her on those issues anxious to shield her from painful and disturbing questions.

That is, however, precisely the attitude that allowed the abuse of children to flourish in church-run institutions for so long. The nuns and the brothers were good people, so when ugly questions arose, it was best not to push them too far.

In saying this, let me say, too, that if I had been in Sister Stanislaus's position in 1977, when she was told about abuse in Kilkenny, I might well have reacted just as she did. Few of us can say with any confidence that we wouldn't. But Sister Stanislaus was an important figure in the old system and her pointed refusal, either on Morning Ireland last week or in The Irish Times on Wednesday, to express regret for her failure to act in 1977 does not augur well for the vital work of coming to terms with what has happened to Irish children.

In 1977, a childcare worker complained strongly and repeatedly to St Joseph's management of about the horrifying treatment of children by a fellow worker, Myles Brady. When his complaints were ignored, he resigned and went to Sister Stanislaus. Then, as Sister Stanislaus put it on Morning Ireland "the man (Myles Brady) was dismissed". The impression many people seem to have taken from this is that Brady's dismissal followed immediately from the approach to Sister Stanislaus. It didn't. Brady was dismissed six months later. And the children in St Joseph's continued to be abused in the meantime.

According to Sister Stanislaus's Irish Times article she was, at the time, "a young nun and the term `sexual abuse' had not, as far as I know, even been coined. It was certainly never discussed even among childcare professionals." Both parts of this statement are open to question.

At the time she was approached, Sister Stanislaus was 37 years old. She was not, as might be assumed from her statement, a naive novice. She was director of Kilkenny Social Services. She held a diploma in social studies from Manchester University. She was running the most important childcare course in the State. She was at least as well versed in all of the issues surrounding the institutional care of children as anyone else.

And it seems extraordinary that, in that capacity, she was unaware that sexual abuse was a subject for discussion among childcare professionals. In Ireland, the Kennedy Report had been concluded in 1970, and since Sister Stanislaus refers to its conclusions and recommendations in her article, it is clear that she studied it with some care. One of the supporting documents cited by the Kennedy Report is a study of "child victims of sex offences". Whether or not the term "sexual abuse" was then current, no one, least of all a childcare expert, can have been in any doubt about the meaning of that term.

It remains difficult, indeed, to square Sister Stanislaus's media statements that she did not know there was sexual abuse in St Joseph's in 1977, with her formal statement to the Garda, given in the presence of her solicitor in 1997, that, when the childcare worker spoke to her, "I picked up on it that he (Brady) might have been sexually abusing them as well".

WHAT is absolutely clear, in any case, is that Sister Stanislaus knew that Myles Brady was physically abusing children in St Joseph's. In her Morn- ing Ireland interview she suggested that her response to this knowledge has to be understood in the context of the prevalence of corporal punishment in schools. And this is, on the surface, a persuasive point. Physical abuse was an official and commonplace policy of virtually all educational institutions at the time. Why should anyone be especially alarmed at the revelation that it was happening in one particular institution?

What this leaves out is the nature and extent of the physical abuse inflicted by Myles Brady on the children in St Joseph's. We are not talking about routine corporal punishment, or even about the excessive use of what were then the normal methods of inflicting pain. We are talking about a grown man breaking a child's leg or knocking a child's teeth out with a blow of his fist. We're talking about grievous bodily harm.

And this was emphatically not acceptable even by the standards of the time. As Sister Stanislaus herself remarked in her Irish Times article, "the Kennedy Report was very aware of the physical punishment which existed in institutions". She might have added that the Kennedy Report expressed horror and outrage at these kinds of punishment. Seven years before she became aware of what Myles Brady was doing in St Joseph's, the central document on childcare in Ireland had made it absolutely clear that physical abuse of this nature was intolerable.

The crucial point to be made in all of this is that attitudes within the Sisters of Charity did not change after the order's leading childcare expert, Sister Stanislaus, had learned of Brady's activities. The attitude expressed with commendable honesty in her statement to the Garda in 1997, "With regard to what happened in St Joseph's, you simply did not ask" remained in place. And this, in turn, was crucial to the events that unfolded in another institution run by the same order, Madonna House, in the 1990s. The fact that questions were not asked, that the terrible experience of St Joseph's did not enter the order's collective memory, was a huge factor in the ability of a paedophile to continue to operate in Madonna House for years after his crimes became known at the highest levels within the institution.

What Madonna House showed is that unless one failure to protect children is fully acknowledged and assimilated into the institutional memory, there will be more such failures. And that applies here and now. If we evade the reality that even a person as admirable and compassionate as Sister Stanislaus could fail children in pain, we will slip into the dangerously smug feeling that now that we are all good, compassionate people, none of this will happen again.