The shocking scale of sexual and physical abuse in educational institutions in Ireland run by the Catholic Church was revealed on Wednesday in a report describing how thousands of children were raped, abused and exploited by the religious brothers and nuns who were supposed to look after them.
The 2,600-page report by Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse found that rape was “endemic” for decades at more than 250 Irish Catholic care institutions from the 1930s to the 1990s, and that the Church in Ireland had protected pedophiles in its ranks from arrest.
“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” it said.
Children in industrial schools and reformatories were treated like convicts and slaves, it said. Rape was particularly common in boys homes and industrial schools run by the Christian Brothers.
John Kelly of the group the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (SOCA) described the failure of the report to recommend criminal prosecutions as a complete whitewash.
The report confirmed allegations from thousands of former students at the institutions. The Ryan Commission said that beatings in institutions run by both priests and nuns were commonplace.
It also criticized the failure of the Irish state, most notably the Department of Education, over allowing the abuse and exploitation to continue for decades.
The department aided this culture “through infrequent, toothless inspectors” that always deferred to the Church’s authority, the report said.
The commission proposed 21 ways the Irish government could recognize past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counseling and education to victims and improving child protection services.
Meanwhile, the new leader of Catholics in England and Wales provoked outrage after describing members of the clergy who admitted to abusing children as courageous for facing up to their past.
In an interview broadcast on Wednesday night, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols said of the report: “It’s very distressing and very disturbing and my heart goes out today first of all to those people who will find that their stories are now told in public.”
“Secondly, I think of those in religious orders and some of the clergy in Dublin who have to face these facts from their past, which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at. That takes courage, and also we shouldn’t forget that this account today will also overshadow all of the good that they also did,” he said.
The US government has signed defense cooperation agreements with Japan and the Philippines to boost the deterrence capabilities of countries in the first island chain, a report by the National Security Bureau (NSB) showed. The main countries on the first island chain include the two nations and Taiwan. The bureau is to present the report at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The US military has deployed Typhon missile systems to Japan’s Yamaguchi Prefecture and Zambales province in the Philippines during their joint military exercises. It has also installed NMESIS anti-ship systems in Japan’s Okinawa
‘WIN-WIN’: The Philippines, and central and eastern European countries are important potential drone cooperation partners, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung said Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) in an interview published yesterday confirmed that there are joint ventures between Taiwan and Poland in the drone industry. Lin made the remark in an exclusive interview with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper). The government-backed Taiwan Excellence Drone International Business Opportunities Alliance and the Polish Chamber of Unmanned Systems on Wednesday last week signed a memorandum of understanding in Poland to develop a “non-China” supply chain for drones and work together on key technologies. Asked if Taiwan prioritized Poland among central and eastern European countries in drone collaboration, Lin
NO CONFIDENCE MOTION? The premier said that being toppled by the legislature for defending the Constitution would be a democratic badge of honor for him Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) yesterday announced that the Cabinet would not countersign the amendments to the local revenue-sharing law passed by the Legislative Yuan last month. Cho said the decision not to countersign the amendments to the Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) was made in accordance with the Constitution. “The decision aims to safeguard our Constitution,” he said. The Constitution stipulates the president shall, in accordance with law, promulgate laws and issue mandates with the countersignature of the head of the Executive Yuan, or with the countersignatures of both the head of the Executive Yuan and ministers or
CABINET APPROVAL: People seeking assisted reproduction must be assessed to determine whether they would be adequate parents, the planned changes say Proposed amendments to the Assisted Reproduction Act (人工生殖法) advanced yesterday by the Executive Yuan would grant married lesbian couples and single women access to legal assisted reproductive services. The proposed revisions are “based on the fundamental principle of respecting women’s reproductive autonomy,” Cabinet spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) quoted Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君), who presided over a Cabinet meeting earlier yesterday, as saying at the briefing. The draft amendment would be submitted to the legislature for review. The Ministry of Health and Welfare, which proposed the amendments, said that experts on children’s rights, gender equality, law and medicine attended cross-disciplinary meetings, adding that
RSS