The God Squad

KAREN COLEMAN

THE BIG PICTURE : A blind support of the church and a craven deference to bankers are two symptoms of the same malaise

IN 1962 Gerry Carey’s father stumbled home after a night of boozing and ordered his family to pack their bags and to leave their house in Co Offaly. He told them he had lost the bungalow in a gambling session earlier that night. Their new home, he mumbled in a drunken haze, was parked outside in the yard. It was a camper van that was more suited to weekend jaunts than a family home for six.

Four-year old Gerry and his bewildered mother and brothers climbed into the camper van and drove a few miles up the road where they parked by a sandpit. For the next two years the Careys eked out an existence depending on handouts from neighbours while their father drank his wages in the local pubs. Neighbours, who employed him as a turf cutter, plied him with booze and spuds in lieu of cash.

Life was miserable in the damp, cold caravan and things gradually worsened for the Careys, until one day in 1964 a man from the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children arrived in a black Anglia. He told Mrs Carey he was taking Gerry and his three brothers away for a while. Someone had contacted the ISPCC and told them of the Careys dire circumstances. Gerry will never forget watching his distraught mother through the back window of the Anglia as he was driven away with his brothers. Mrs Carey was wringing her arms in despair as she watched her beloved sons being taken away.

That fateful day changed Gerry Carey’s life forever. He ended up spending the next eight years in St Joseph’s Industrial School in Salthill, Co Galway, which was run by the Christian Brothers. His incarceration in St Joseph’s was punctuated by physical, psychological and sexual abuse and his traumatic experiences there nearly broke him. Gerry eventually ended up a homeless alcoholic begging on the streets for booze money during the day and sleeping in a hostel for the homeless at night.

Gerry Carey’s story is one of 11 told in Haunting Cries – a book I have written about the abuse of children in Irish religious institutions. Their stories mirror those of thousands who were incarcerated in abusive institutions run by religious orders. That legacy of abuse was the focus of much outpouring of grief last year when the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its report. The Ryan Report provoked a tsunami of grief as a shocked Irish nation absorbed its gut-wrenching accounts of institutional brutality; accounts that validated the stories survivors of child abuse had been telling us for years.

People shook their heads in disbelief and asked how those acting in the name of God could have behaved so callously. We pledged never to forget this grim chapter in our history.

A year on, those promises have faded like the distant echo of a drum retreating into history as Ireland titters on the brink of economic implosion and edges ever closer to International Monetary Fund and European Union intervention. The potential loss of sovereign control over national purses has catapulted us into a state of paralysis. It is as if Damocles himself is dangling his sword over all of our futures. We are jaded and worn down by daily doses of bad news and we have little capacity to be reminded of past stories of child institutional abuse.

That intolerance to misery is understandable. But we ignore the past at our peril. It is no coincidence that a State that so shamefully facilitated the past incarceration of vulnerable children into the clutches of abusive religious institutions is today grappling with the enormous consequences of a different legacy of abuse; this time one conducted by a bunch of casino bankers, cowboy developers and incompetent, weak and irresponsible regulators, politicians and civil servants who failed to put the brakes on an overheating property bubble.

This thread of dysfunction has coursed through our historical veins since the foundation of the State when Ireland was hijacked by an all-powerful Roman Catholic Church and an army of loyal followers led by Éamon de Valera, whose supine support for the church guaranteed its grip over the State for decades. That lethal marriage of theocracy and autocracy facilitated the creation of a nanny state where a culture of fear, poverty, ignorance and conservatism gave those in authority dangerous powers.

Those powers enabled a judicial system to try children without proper legal representation because they were too poor to afford a lawyer. Draconian sentences were handed down for minor offences such as mitching from school or stealing bars of chocolate. Unfortunate children were exiled to hellholes like Daingean, Letterfrack and Artane – names that are now synonymous with unremitting brutality.

The Department of Education was another instrument of the State that failed to supervise abusive religious institutions. In April 1954, the then minister for education Sean Moylan addressed queries in the Dáil about a young boy called Mickey Flanagan who was incarcerated in Artane Industrial School. Mickey’s arm had been broken in three places after a Christian Brother beat him with the handle of a brush. His mother had approached her local TD, who in turn raised Mickey’s case in the Dáil.

Moylan dismissed the violence against Mickey as an isolated incident and he told the House he could not conceive that men who had been trained for a life of sacrifice and austerity could be capable of sadism. Had Moylan intervened and conducted a thorough inspection of Artane, he could have prevented the cruelty that continued there until its closure in 1969.

For decades we trusted the State and church to manage significant chunks of our lives, from our education and health to the moulding of our moral values and sexual mores. During the Celtic Tiger years, the State seemed to have swapped its blind support of the church for a naive endorsement of the bankers and developers.

That deference has had devastating consequences. We only have to witness the rapid unravelling of our erstwhile wealth to see how our culture of nepotism and cronyism enabled the bankers and developers to hijack our economy for their own self-interested greed. They threw the dice on our futures and gambled away our financial security – unfettered capitalism facilitated by the State. Now that wealth has to be rebuilt.

In what is a fitting illustration of our cute hoor culture, the man who led the country for most of the boom years today grins out of a cupboard in a television ad mumbling something about a match. And the pubic performance of Bertie Ahern’s successor is little better. Brian Cowen’s cringing interview on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland , following his night of revelry in Galway, reflected a staggering disconnection from a nation gripped by fear. His asinine behaviour cost us dearly both financially and in reputation.

Our naive trust in the State and government meant we too readily bought into their empty promises of soft landings and perpetual wealth. We believed the economists who were trotted out to reinforce the myth that this gutsy, swashbuckling island nation of ours was bucking the trend of financial norms and facing decades of prosperity.

That heady cocktail of arrogance and fables meant we too eagerly approved the light regulation that enabled the bankers to stuff our pockets with enough money to drown our over priced pads in crippling mortgages. So we all share a collective responsibility in our current economic woes – just as, in the past, villagers turned away from the ragged boys who ran terrified from Daingean reformatory school as they were hunted down like animals by the Brothers running the place.

Today the cracks in our State structures continue. Take our healthcare system. The Health Service Executive’s response to budget cuts is to cancel surgeries, shut wards and shove ever more patients on waiting lists instead of tackling its own burgeoning administrative costs and coming up with more visionary ways of cost-efficiencies. And this is the same healthcare system that is still failing to look after vulnerable children in its care.

But it’s not all hopeless. These tough times can give us golden opportunities for radical change; a chance to rid ourselves of this national cancer of cronyism, to enable the birth of a modern, progressive, entrepreneurial country that fosters responsible behaviour where transparency and accountability replace the grubby, shifty, wheeling-dealing culture that allowed the gangsters of commerce to bring this country to its knees. We need to streamline our public sector, modernise our trade unions, foster private enterprise and ensure that our hard-earned money isn’t frittered away again by those purporting to be looking after us.

Our political system needs a radical overhaul to encourage a more dynamic mix of men and women in Dáil Éireann. And we need to build a fairer society where the poor are not subsidising the elite.

It is possible to rebuild from the ashes of despair. Gerry Carey is an inspiring example. When he left Salthill he became an alcoholic and spent years living in a drunken haze. His addiction to booze destroyed his marriage and eventually he was asked to leave the family home.

He ended up sleeping in a hostel for the homeless in Dublin and begging for drink money during the day. Then in 1998, when he was 40, he had a Damascene conversion that propelled him on a road to recovery.

It followed an eight-day drinking binge with a fellow destitute. The pair had received a windfall payment from the social welfare and they went on an almighty pub crawl. On the eighth day, when Gerry woke up in the hostel in an alcoholic stupor, he could barely move. His drinking buddy banged on the door and practically dragged him to a pub in Temple Bar where the pair lashed into the pints.

When Gerry was drinking his second pint he looked around the bar and turned to his fellow vagrant and vowed that he would never drink again. His bemused friend laughed at him.

But Gerry was serious.

After that momentous day, he went into rehab and began to rebuild his life. He trained as a counsellor for survivors of abuse; he secured a council flat in central Dublin and he re-established relations with his family. Today he remains sober and has just started working in a new centre in Galway for survivors of child abuse.

Gerry Carey’s story should give us all hope. If he can pick himself up from the gutter then surely we, as a nation working together, can do the same?

Haunting Cries by has just been published. Karen Coleman presents The Wide Angle on Newstalk on Sunday mornings