Irish Times view on Australian child abuse apology: echoes reverberate around the globe

The echoes from Australia were unmistakeable. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s apology, on behalf of the state to people who as children had been abused in institutions, followed a five year Royal Commission inquiry. In Ireland a comparable apology was delivered 10 years before publication of the Ryan report which made similar findings about the abuse of children in such institutions in Ireland.

“On behalf of the state and all its citizens, the Government wishes to make a sincere and long overdue apology to the victims of childhood abuse for our collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue,” said then taoiseach Bertie Ahern on May 11th, 1999. “I want to say to them that we believe they were gravely wronged, and that we must do all we can now to overcome the lasting effects of their ordeals”.

Ahern announced a Commission of Inquiry which documented its findings across 2,600 pages in the Ryan report which was published in May 2009. He also announced a Redress Board which went on to make awards to 15,562 people who received an average €62,240.

Children in the two countries were victims of a primitive Victorian system which was sustained in both long after it had been abandoned in Britain where it originated

“We believe you,” prime minister Morrison told victims, survivors and their families before the Australian House of Representatives on Monday. “Today, we confront a question too horrible to ask, let alone answer – why weren’t the children of our nation loved, nurtured and protected? Why was their trust betrayed?”

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It is a question which will be explored for many years to come both in Ireland and Australia. Children in the two countries were victims of a primitive Victorian system which was sustained in both long after it had been abandoned in Britain where it originated.

Significant in both countries too has been the key role of women in exposing these abuses. The May 1999 apology by Ahern was made just prior to the broadcast by RTÉ of a final programme in the shattering three-part ‘States of Fear’ series about abuse in institutions for children in Ireland.

Prepared by the late Mary Raftery, assisted by Sheila Ahern, it had a profound impact. As important were behind the scenes meetings in early 1999 involving Ahern and then minister for education Micheál Martin with the late Christine Buckley, Carmel McDonnell Byrne and Bernadette Fahy. All three had taken part in the 1996 ‘Dear Daughter’ documentary which dealt with abuses in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage.

In the Australian House of Representatives on Monday there was applause when former prime minister Julia Gillard’s name was mentioned. It was she who in 2013 established the Royal Commission whose report led to the apology in Canberra. Yet it is too simplistic to reduce this often wanton abuse of children to a gender issue. After all Goldenbridge, as with similar institutions in Ireland and Australia, was run by nuns.