The God Squad

‘It was murder of the soul’

A terrible legacy is born. What emerges from the publication of the Ryan Commission’s report on the penal system in which thousands of Irish children were incarcerated for long periods of their lives, is that Church and state are still one, still arm in arm, and that they will protect each other, no matter what.

There are many ways in which violence is perpetrated on humans by humans. As Oscar Wilde said, some do it with a kiss, some do it with a sword.

The Irish state does it with a report. Silence is violence, because in that silence is the hurt and the stress caused by denial. The unacknowledged impact of what happened to the children of Ireland will not rest and we will further traumatise generations to come with what the Irish state has done by failing to honour the universal code of natural law.

People will frenzy obsessively, as they have in the past, around the sordid details of sexual abuse. They will look for extreme examples to measure the extent of its brutality.

Sexual assault is merely a term employed to describe parts of the human body and human biology. It belittles, to some extent and, to another extent, sexualises violence for the onlooker and the reader. But for the victim there is no sexual aspect; there is just the extreme violence of the act perpetrated on them. The act is immeasurable, as its impact ebbs and flows and bashes against the coast of the individual’s life, gnawing away at personhood and spirit forever.

When I hear the words sexual abuse, it betrays what happened to me and to countless thousands of other children and adults. I believe it is now time for the phrase ‘sexual abuse’ to be dropped and replaced with a much more realistic definition, more befitting the actual crime, which is an act of extreme violence and murder of the soul.

The report confirms to me in its entirety the overwhelming willingness of the Irish state to offer protection to the perpetrators of inhuman acts on the most vulnerable in our society, children.

These acts were perpetrated, by and large, on one class within Irish society, a class or a community of people regarded as ‘‘God’s unfortunates’’.

The perpetrators convinced themselves of a great untruth: that people in a lower socio-economic group needed their intervention, their charity and their moral guidance. They endlessly sought to corral, close down, disempower and render voiceless this whole section of society.

It is enormously difficult to find your voice in a society that wishes to overwhelm you with the way it wants you to live its version of your life.

For many years, my struggle for a place in Irish society was based on the false principle that, somewhere out there, someone in the state cared and was going to bring truth and honour, justice and consequences, and so give me and others our rightful place as equal citizens in this society.

We looked to the great white hope of the Ryan Commission, and those hopes have been dashed. What is the point in deliberately building a car that won’t work? This was, in effect, the process the Irish state set in train. Thousands of statements of fact were taken, vital evidence of collaboration, of crimes against humanity were gathered by Mr Justice Ryan’s Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and, instead of being handed to the law enforcement officers of the state, they were rendered impotent, null and useless.

What is printed now – the horror stories – will go down in history as a sort of pornography, the black diaries of the Irish state and its ruling classes and how those classes protected their henchmen and women, those who ran for them a series of what can only be described as inhumane labour camps and child prisons.

All of this was done under the state’s legal system but, in real terms, it had no basis in law. Here, the state has failed to probe how it contained and incarcerated 150,000 children. Before the children arrived in any of these institutions, all their legal, civil and human rights were stripped from them by the state. Throughout their detention, they were violently stripped of every other asset, right down to the core of their humanity.

In the place of the innocence that all children carry was instilled an experience of extreme violence, fear and terror that they would carry throughout their lives and that would permeate down through the generations to their family and community.

What this report has ensured is that the next generation of innocent children will inherit from the Irish state a legacy of brutality and cowardice in place of courage. The world will look and acknowledge that this state, when faced with a choice of bringing criminals to justice, chose to protect them, because those criminals were, after all, its very own.

The state protected itself, its agents and servants; the Church protected itself, its agents and servants. Both combined and conspired to protect hideous, monstrous, violent men and women at the expense, not only of those who, as children, were placed into the hands of the merciless masquerading as the merciful, but of Irish society as a whole.

This report is a further act of violence. I can only look now to the Human Rights Commission to set up a complete independent inquiry as to how the Irish state betrayed all of its citizens and in doing so betrayed the human race. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was trampled on last week by the failure of the Ryan Commission report to use any of its witness statements to bring to justice the perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

Rest assured that this was no mistake and, as the saying goes, this report did indeed do the state some service. Let’s see what the UN has to say about that.

Author and playwright Mannix Flynn spent two years in the late 1960s at Letterfrack Industrial School in Galway.

The Sunday Business Post 24th May 2009