Sen Eoghan Harris blames republicanism for child sexual abuse

[SirHenryGrattan]

The Ryan Report Team commissioned a comparison of the treatment of residents in English industrial schools with that in Ireland. The gist of the report is that most industrial schools were effectively shut down in 1939 for the duration of the war when children were evacuated from the south and fostered out. The industrial schools were formally closed in 1948 with the advent of the welfare state. Prior to 1939 the experience of children in British industrial schools would have been similar to that experienced by children in Ireland.


Residential Child Care in England, 1948 – 1975: A History And Report Richard Rollinson Bath Consultancy Bath England


In response to a request from the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse
(CICA) I set out below a brief history of residential child care in England
during the period 1948 – 1975. This covers the time in Ireland with which,
as I understand it, the current Inquiry is most greatly concerned.


1.19 In England before World War II the conditions and circumstances of
residential care can be put very simply. Apart from very occasional
exceptions, whether in Children’s Homes – to which children were sent via
the welfare route – or in Approved Schools – at which children arrived via
the justice route of a Court Order, having committed a crime, residential care
was an unrelenting daily experience of dull, drab, regimented and miserable
routine. Punishments for bedwetting or even slight transgressions of a
myriad of rigid rules were common, as was “brutish insensitivity” (Parker,
1990). Sustained cruelty was far from uncommon. While legislation earlier
in the century had sought to mitigate its most damaging impact on children,
the Poor Law continued to loom large over the residential scene and
penetrate almost all its aspects, from entry through residence to discharge
and beyond, serving in effect as a stark message of deterrence to society at large. Efforts to change further this oppressive mentality and reality had
little effect.


1.20 It is no exaggeration to state therefore that the arrival of war and its
massive impact on the entire English people opened up first the opportunity
and then the imperative for fundamental changes in attitudes to the care of
children in general and the provision of residential care in particular. The
war brought the nation together in a way never before experienced. People
felt a nation united and many encountered directly for the very first time
through the bombing of the cities and the mobilisation for total war the
enduring and immense poverty suffered by no small part of the population
now working and fighting side by side with those more fortunate and
comfortable. This experience did much to truly democratise citizenship
beyond the state of “passive subject” and to lay the foundations of a Welfare
State which would seek in the aftermath of war to protect, ameliorate and
enhance the lives of all equally and as of right and entitlement.

[SirHenryGrattan]

Id disagree . Being in control of a primary school is not an explanation as to why institutions of the state - politicians , media , judges , police etc colluded in these horrific crimes by turning a blind eye to them .

The real reason is public apathy. The Irish Womens Liberation Movement picketed McQuaids Palace in Dublin in 1971 when he made public his opposition to contraception. There were never pickets outside industrial schools. Deep down the public do not care about child abuse. Michael Jackson and Oscar Wilde remain very popular and both of them were paedophiles.