Archbishop Diarmuid Martin was confronted by former residents of institutions run by religious orders yesterday when he arrived to say Easter Sunday Mass at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin.
About a dozen former residents of institutions run by religious congregations protested outside the cathedral, its railings draped in pairs of infants’ shoes, with black ribbons attached. Stewards refused some protesters admittance to the cathedral.
Kevin Flanagan, whose brother Michael had been in Artane, said he was refused entry to the church his mother had attended for 15 years. “She gave money to this church,” he said.
Mr Flanagan challenged the archbishop when he came out to meet the protesters. “He was talking on the radio about accountability. I said ‘you’re covering up for Cardinal Connell . . . there’s no accountability there. He should be charged for withholding information about criminals’,” he said. Dr Martin said that was being investigated by gardaí.
John Ayers, who “was beaten every day to make me a Catholic”, told the archbishop: “Your church is not welcome in my country any more. It is a Nazi religion. I want it to leave my country, I want you to leave my country.”
Among those allowed in were “Antoinette” and Rachel. After the offertory procession, they brought pairs of infants’ shoes to the altar “as a symbol” and recognition that some who had served behind altar rails abused children. Antoinette could go no further than the rails.
As they returned down the aisle, people in the pews said: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves”; “It’s a disgrace”; “How dare ye!”; and “Shame on you”. Nervous anyhow, this upset both women deeply.
Other protesters included Rose, who spent 15 years at a “high-class industrial school”, as the nuns described it, in Cork.
She wept yesterday, recalling the punishments children suffered there: being put in with pigs, being stung with nettles, made to eat what they had thrown up, as well as the splitting up of her family of six.
Marie Therese was a resident of the Goldenbridge orphanage in Dublin until the age of 16. At the age of nine, she left a host family and was found on O’Connell Street.
She recalled she was never to see the outside of the orphanage again for seven years. Yesterday she had a doll in one hand and a copy of Oliver Twist in the other, the doll to symbolise what she never had in childhood.
At the Mass Dr Martin said the protesters’ anger was understandable. It happened wherever you encountered a loss of childhood, he said.