Justine McCarthy: Enough of the meaningless hand-wringing over abuse by Christian Brothers

When Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the decision to crucify Jesus Christ, as St Matthew’s gospel recounts, he listened to the people first. Local politicians in Co Louth have not extended even that courtesy to a group of men who were criminally abused when they were children by members of the Christian Brothers.

About 30 adult survivors of sexual abuse in the congregation’s schools invited elected members of Louth County Council to meet them and hear about the torment they suffered as boys. They wanted to explain why they believe the honorary freedom of Drogheda should be withdrawn from the 1997 recipient, Br Edmund Garvey, who was the order’s world leader at the time it was bestowed.

After the Ryan commission’s report on abuse of children in institutions was published in 2009, Garvey was interviewed on Newstalk radio and urged anyone who had suffered at the hands of the order to go to the courts with their cases. The so-called “Christian” Brothers promised to deal with future claims in a conciliatory manner.

Subsequently, when Drogheda-born Garvey was the head of its European province, the order adopted an oppressive legal strategy requiring claimants to sue all its members individually in civil law cases. This followed a Supreme Court ruling that unincorporated bodies such as religious congregations could not be sued collectively, requiring a single member to be nominated in civil cases or, if not, all members would have to be individually sued.

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Garvey and his successor, Br David Gibson, have refused to nominate anyone, thus obliging the survivors to deal with, potentially, about 160 law firms in various jurisdictions and necessitating expensive High Court applications for compulsion orders. Some plaintiffs, having had to get discovery orders to establish the identities and whereabouts of the members after the order refused to supply the information voluntarily, have described the litigation strategy as “a double abuse”.

The men and their chief advocate, Damian O’Farrell, an Independent Dublin city councillor who reached an out-of-court settlement with the Christian Brothers for sexual abuse he suffered when he was 12, hired a room in the Boyne Valley Hotel in Drogheda last autumn, arranged for beverages and pastries to be served, and issued RSVP invitations to the Louth councillors. Then they waited, and they waited, and they waited. Several councillors did not even bother replying.

Last month, when a motion by independent councillor Maeve Yore to rescind Garvey’s honorary freedom came before Louth County Council, the members agreed to wash their hands of it and passed the buck to Drogheda Borough Council.

Drogheda’s 10-member council is due to vote on the motion on September 4th. The auguries do not look good for the survivors. Only one of the 10 has publicly endorsed the motion. At the July county meeting, Paddy McQuillan, Independent, said the freedom should be revoked because Garvey’s behaviour was “without love, accountability, regard or respect for the victims of sexual abuse”.

What the Christian Brothers is doing to men seeking redress for the abuse they suffered as children is utterly un-Christian

On Monday this week, Michael Reade of LMFM, who has persistently covered these events on the local radio station, said his programme had attempted to contact the 10 councillors seeking to establish how they intended voting on Monday week. Not one of them gave a substantive answer. Four made no response whatsoever. They are Tom Cunningham, Sinn Féin; Michelle Hall, Labour Party; Declan Power, Independent; and Eileen Tully, the town’s Fine Gael mayor.

Of the remaining six, Pio Smith, Labour, said he had “no further comment”. Joanna Byrne, Sinn Féin, said she would speak to the programme after she saw the agenda for the meeting. Kevin Callan, Independent, said “no comment”. Paddy McQuillan said he had “nothing to add”. James Byrne, Fianna Fáil, was away on leave. And Emma Cutlip, Labour, said she wanted to consult her party colleagues.

Tully subsequently told The Irish Times that she believes the vote should be held in secret because there was “murder” when the issue was discussed last month. She likened it to “a public flogging”. Hall said she had not yet decided how she would be voting. The politicians’ reticence is compounding the survivors’ anguish.

Drogheda has seen the pillars of its community let abuse victims down before.

This is the town where consultant obstetrician Michael Neary performed unnecessary hysterectomies on 129 women at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, often immediately after childbirth and sometimes on very young women who had no children. Two nurse midwives raised the alarm in 1998 but, according to Judge Maureen Harding Clark, who conducted a State inquiry into Neary’s womb-whipping spree, “there was resentment towards the whistleblowers, [talk that] they would never get a job in Ireland, that they would be sued for defamation and would generally come to a bad end”. Neary was never prosecuted for the harm he did.

In a macabre conjunction of events, around the same time and in the same hospital, another consultant called Michael Shine, a surgeon specialising in breast cancer and undescended testes in young males, was facing criminal charges for indecently assaulting six of his teenage male patients. When the hospital started receiving complaints about him and suspended him pending inquiries, nine other consultants wrote to the chairman of its health board in 1995 calling for his reinstatement. A separate statement by 13 ward sisters in support of Shine was submitted to investigating gardaí. After a four-week trial in Dundalk Circuit Court, Shine was found not guilty. It took another decade for him to be convicted, for the first time, on charges of abusing his patients. The High Court was told there were at least 112 survivors of abuse perpetrated by Shine.

Just as Neary and Shine were respected figures in Drogheda, Br Edmund Garvey is too. The scion of a well-known business family, the Christian Brothers schools that he was in charge of have educated many leading lights of the local citizenry, as well as their offspring. While vestiges of loyalty to someone with such strong personal links may be part of human nature, they should not still the hands of justice. What the Christian Brothers is doing to men seeking redress for the abuse they suffered as children is utterly un-Christian.

Too often in the past, politicians turned a deaf ear to survivors’ complaints only, then, to jump on the bandwagon when those abused people were proven to be the truth-tellers at State inquiries. On September 4th, Drogheda politicians will have their chance to stop the meaningless hand-wringing and dangerous hand-washing and, instead, to do what anyone with an ounce of compassion knows is the right thing by passing the motion to rescind Garvey’s freedom of the town.