Paul Hosford: Inquiry into abuse in religious-run schools leaves bike shed in the ha’penny place

The bike shelter has become a cause célèbre, a factory for jokes and forwarded WhatsApp memes, and a totem for much of the malaise that people see in the Irish public sector. 

It is, depending on your view, a totem for a wasteful civil service that is detached from reality, an example of a tone-deaf Government that will come without consequences or a uniquely-Irish “aren’t we all mad?” curiosity that will be joked about for many years like voting machines or the Time In The Slime, the infamous countdown clock to the millennium placed in Dublin’s River Liffey in the ’90s.

The beauty of the story around the bike shelter — having seen it up close, it’s really not much of a shed — is that it is what we in the media industry call “a talker”. It is a story that stands on its own merit, but has the added attraction of being something people will talk about in pubs, in taxis, in social media groups. It has certainly done that.

And while being angry about the flaithiúlach use of public funds is right and appropriate, it has been somewhat striking that there has seemed to be less anger over something which could cost the State hundreds of times more.

On Tuesday, the Government published the scoping inquiry by senior counsel Mary O’Toole into historic sexual abuse at religious-run boarding and day schools.

The report is, by any measure, sickening.

Litany of abuses and cover-ups 

It paints a picture of a system where adults charged with the care of children, some of them medically or intellectually vulnerable, were able to rape, beat, and scar those same children with not just impunity, but with the collusion and consent of others, with a blind eye turned by those who should have called a stop to it. The authors say that the majority of participants gave accounts of what they saw “as various forms of cover-up by those in authority”.

In one section, a victim says that there were women working at his school at the time “who were suspicious of what was happening and may have called the guards”.

When the participant asked where the priest was, they were told by other boys “that the guards took him”. The priest was back the next day.

It goes on to say that the man told a priest in 1978 in the school, and a detective involved with the hurling team, but “nothing was done to stop the abuse”. 

The victim recalled that people from his area knew that the teacher was a serial abuser who boarded in the same house as the local gardaí.

It is not clear if the local police were aware at the time, but I find it incredulous that some members of the gardaí were unaware at the time, as very little happens in a small provincial town that they don’t know. 

Alongside the commission of investigation agreed by Cabinet on Tuesday will be a redress scheme. With nearly 2,400 allegations at 308 schools from the scoping inquiry alone, some in Government believe that the figure could hit hundreds of millions, if not billions. Based on the figures in the scoping inquiry alone, and the average payment from similar schemes, around €80m is seen as the minimum amount a scheme would cost.

The depth and scale of abuse outlined in the scoping inquiry was covered extensively on Tuesday and since. 

But for many it was nothing new. 

We have always known that there was abuse in religious run schools, in churches, in Magdalene laundries.

We know because the Ryan Report and the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes report told us. We know because the State has paid out hundreds of millions in the former case, with religious orders stumping up just 16% of the overall figure, which could run to €1.5bn.

A reckoning between Church and State

It is, in that context, understandable that people may see the scoping inquiry report as just another tome in Ireland’s dark history, but it should really be seen as an important part of a long-needed catharsis. A stepping stone on a reckoning between Church and State. A document which drags what everyone “knows” out from behind its veneer of translucence and into the light and firmly and finally says: This is what happened, this is how it happened and these are its victims.

We’re adults. We can care about two things at once. A bike shelter that wastes public money is worthy of investigation and scrutiny. But it is not the scandal of the week. Just because the violence meted out to the children in schools run by supposed men and women of God is historical, just because we “knew” it had happened does not make the reality and specifics and the ongoing ramifications any less outrageous.

What we owe the survivors

There will be a long commission of investigation, maybe as many as seven or eight years, arising from the report and the abuse. It will be covered up and down by the media but will not make the front pages for most of that. It will be a long, painful process that will attempt to shine a light on a national scar, an intergenerational trauma that still casts a long shadow over our national identity.

We owe it to the survivors who are able and willing to come forward, to those still unable to give voice to what was visited upon them, and we owe it to those who have since passed to listen to what happened. Not to just inherently think that we know the generalities and ignore the specifics. 

We owe it to the victims and to ourselves to watch, to listen and to learn, no matter what the outrage of the time is.