John Banville writes,
Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew.
If by “knew” he means were aware of the general application of gross physical, psychological and sexual torment, I can say with certainty that I – born in Galway in 1963 and resident in Ireland for the following 25 or so years – did not know.
I was aware of the existence of industrial schools and my mother, at moments when my siblings and I gravely tried her patience, would threaten to have us sent to one of them, Letterfrack. In so far as I thought about them at all, I imagined them as being a full time version of the primary school I went to. The savage who ran the place regularly slapped pupils in the face/across the head, or grabbed their ears and twisted hard when they didn’t answer fast enough. I generally escaped the worst of this but I still remember more formal punishments that involved getting caned across the hands with a bamboo switch. Bad enough, but light years away from what went on in the industrial schools.
Loose talk about us all – Banville, me and everyone else – “knowing” and the idle comparison he later makes with the Jewish and Armenian genocides tends to dissolve the guilt among the population at large and lessen the share of those directly responsible, every last one of whom was a uniformed agent of the Catholic church, and those indirectly so, the secular authorities who cringed before the crozier and let the religious have their evil and perverted way with huge numbers of children.
As Sean Coleman puts it,
… there was a kind of cultural deference, a national stoop, which meant that what the Church was doing simply wasn’t seriously questioned. The report makes this quite clear: ‘The deferential and submissive attitude of the Department of Education towards the Congregations compromised its ability to carry out its statutory duty of inspection and monitoring of the schools’; ‘The Departments’ Secretary General, at a public hearing, told the Investigation Committee that the Department had shown a “very significant deference” towards the religious Congregations’. In effect, the state ceded its jurisdiction to the Church; indeed, in certain circumstances the Church became the state.
Perhaps now would be a good time to give some renewed thought to exactly what kind of state Ireland has been for a considerable part of its existence. To what extent can it be said to have been democratic during the first 50 years of its existence, when there was practically no limit on the power of the church? Instead of comparing our history in that period to that of Denmark, would we not be better off looking at, say, Pakistan?