EVIDENCE that brutality towards children may have been institutionalised in Sisters of Mercy orphanages has emerged in an Australian television documentary and in newspaper reports.
The reports detail abuses in four of the order's orphanages in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s, similar to those which many former residents have alleged took place in Goldenbridge orphanage in Dublin.
Ms Christine Buckley, whose story was told in last year's Louis Lentin production Dear Daughter, says she and other residents want a public inquiry into what happened in Goldenbridge.
The abuses catalogued by the 60 Minutes programme on CBS Australia at the three Australian orphanages and by the newspaper The Age at a fourth, include the following which resemble abuses alleged at Goldenbridge:
. Starvation: children at Goldenbridge were so hungry they stole food from the orphanage's guinea pigs and rabbits; a man who spent his childhood at the order's Rockhampton, Queensland, orphanage spoke of being whipped for stealing molasses from the pigs.
. Isolation: former Goldenbridge residents say they were sometimes locked in a furnace room; a woman who had been at Rockhampton said she had been forced into a foetal position in a cupboard and was locked into it for an afternoon; a woman who was a child in the Goodwood, Adelaide, orphanage talked of being locked into an attic for many weekends.
. Involving children in cruelty: Ms Buckley says children's under- clothes at Goldenbridge were displayed every week, other children were asked to judge if they were soiled and the children to whom they belonged were then flogged; a former resident of the order's Albury orphanage in New South Wales recalls a girl being stripped and put on an ant nest and the other children being made to poke at the nest with sticks to get the ants to come out to sting her; in the order's orphanage in Geelong, children were told to fill a bath with cold water and the child who was being punished would be put into the bath and held under the water by two or three nuns until she stopped struggling, sometimes until her face went blue.
. Scalding incidents: Ms Buckley has alleged that she was scalded with boiling water because she had fallen asleep on the landing to which she had been sent for punishment; a woman in Rockhampton as a child showed the camera her badly scarred leg which, she says, was forced into boiling water by a nun because she had an infection; a woman in Geelong says a nun deliberately pushed her leg against a blazing gas heater as a punishment and she was badly burned.
. An obsession with bedwetting: children in Goldenbridge were severely beaten each morning if they wet their beds. One former resident told a programme on Goldenbridge broadcast by CBS in the US that the children were not given water so they would not wet the beds and had to drink water out of the toilet bowls, an allegation backed up by Ms Buckley; in Rockhampton bed-wetters were stripped and beaten publicly until they bled and had to wear the wet sheets on their heads.
In the Australian programme a spokeswoman for the order described much of what went on as a different disciplinary approach to what is usual now. She likened the incident of the girl being locked into a press for the afternoon to the practice of sending a naughty child to her room. When the interviewer express astonishment at the comparison the spokeswoman said the girls in the orphanages had no rooms of their own.
But by the time the programme was broadcast, the order had issued a general apology which was read out at the end.