The bishops should repent for their wicked schools

LETTERFRACK, DAINGEAN, Artane. Names that bristled with fear. These were industrial schools where the poor, the delinquent, the abandoned children of our state were given into the care of religious brothers, priests and nuns. We all knew of somebody or somebody's brother or sister who'd ended up in one of the reformatories. And we knew bad things happened there: beatings where you could roar and scream, and no mother or father would hear and save you.

For the children who vanished into the industrial school system there was no way out. They were our society's castoffs. The poor for whom nobody would speak, least of all the Church that professed to uphold the Christian values of charity and compassion. The three schools I mentioned - Letterfrack, Daingean, Artane - were only the most well-known of a system of religious gulags spread around the country. The last of them closed in 1986.

The matter is much in the news in Ireland these days. Thanks to a television series and an accompanying book, Suffer the Little Children by Mary Raftery and Eoin O'Sullivan, the long silence about what happened in these places has been shattered. It is hard to read the accounts of suffering in this powerful book without feeling a deep anger. The whispers that came back to us as children were in fact a gross understatement. Rape, beatings, humiliation, starvation. All in our holy, smug little republic.

It is worth quoting some case studies. Like many of the children who were sent into care, Terry, nine, was a victim of poverty. He and his five-year-old brother were sent to St Joseph's Industrial School at Ferryhouse in County Tipperary from 1952 to 1959. Their mother had died in childbirth, and their father could not cope with a family of six children. This is Terry's account:

I was lucky, I didn't wet the bed. But my little brother , who was only five, did - he'd come up to me in the morning and tell me, and my heart would bleed for him because I knew he'd be beaten... sometimes he'd soil himself as well - he was only a little fellow, not much more than a baby. The Brothers would make me clean him up. I didn't mind at all especially if it saved him a beating. But one time one of the Brothers handed me his strap - a big, black heavy thing - and told me to beat my brother with it. This was the only way to stop him soiling himself, he said. So I gave my brother just a little tip with the strap. The Brother took it off me and said: "I'll show you how to do it," and gave the little fellow a wallop. I refused to take the strap again after that, and the Brother got in a rage and gave him an awful hiding.

Five years old and away from your mother and father. Is it any wonder he'd wet the bed. Girls were also punished brutally in the institutions run by nuns. Consider Margaret's story:

You'd be beaten for anything and often for nothing. The nuns had a huge big black leather strap, very thick, about an inch and a half, maybe two inches thick, with a lot of tight threads. It always left a big mark on you like criss-crosses on your arms. That was used quite frequently. And then if they didn't have that, they'd use branches of trees, sticks, legs of chairs, whatever came to hand... Sometimes the nun would be hitting girls and they'd just stand there. And some of the others and myself, we would cry for them. Because they wouldn't cry, to be brave they wouldn't cry. So we would cry for them.

Again bedwetters were ritually humiliated, beaten and forced to wear soiled sheets on their heads or stand in the cold for hours on end.

I try not to think about it, but those kids, babies really, when they wet the bed they were taken out and put into cold showers... There was one little girl that I really loved. She was about two or three and she was terrified of wetting the bed, and I was terrified of what they'd do to her if she did. So every night she'd knock on the glass partition opposite my bed and call my name and say she needed to go to the toilet. We were both so terrified that we'd stay awake, often maybe till two in the morning, until she knocked on the glass and I brought her to the toilet. I couldn't sleep until until I knew she was safe and comfortable in bed.

Stripping children naked and beating them; shaving their heads as punishment; hauling them out of their beds to be flogged on the stairwells for misdemeanours. The sexual abuse of children was also widespread. In an atmosphere of terror, the Christian Brothers in particular earned a reputation for harbouring chronic child abusers. As Barney, a survivor of the Artane industrial school recalled:

Then he told me to take off my clothes. And right there in front of the whole class, he sat down on the bench, on the desk with his foot on the bench where the boys would sit and write, and his other foot on the ground. He opened his cassock and put me across it and put his left hand under my private parts. He was squeezing me and beating the living hell out of my bare backside. He was foaming at the mouth, jumping and bopping.

It happened throughout the system. And it was largely ignored by the state. That respected campaigner for the rights of children, Father Flanagan - founder of Boys Town in the United States - toured Ireland's industrial schools in 1946. He made scathing public criticisms of the system, and was denounced by the leading politicians of the day. In private correspondence he wrote:

What you need over there is to have someone shake you loose from your smugness and satisfaction and set an example by punishing those who are guilty of cruelty, ignorance and neglect of their duties in high places... I wonder what God's judgement will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children.

Now that the government has officially apologised and announced a commission of inquiry, there is the beginning of an acknowledgement of the evil done to so many children. Many of the religious orders have apologised, including the Christian Brothers. As for the Catholic hierarchy, they have hardly fallen over themselves to atone for the damage done by their priests, brothers and nuns. A certain defensiveness has crept in, the old excuse of a few "bad apples" is brought out, and a hunt is on to find inaccuracies in survivors' accounts in order to discredit claims of abuse.

This is not an anti-church rant. I had a great education courtesy of the Presentation Brothers. They were decent and upright men and I will be forever in their debt. And in the industrial school system there were also lots of decent and upright people. But I'm afraid you don't mitigate the horror inflicted on so many children by arguing the case of the good apples. What we need from the hierarchy is a complete opening of the files of the Roman Catholic Church itself. What did they know, and what did their friends in government know?

When complaints were made, how far up the line did they go? Disguise names to protect the innocent or the victims, but tell us what was reported to you, and what action you took. And when that is over, it would be nice to see our bishops and government ministers go down on their knees in public and ask forgiveness on behalf of their predecessors who presided over that wicked system.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent