LAST YEAR, when the terrible Josef Fritzl incest case was uncovered in Austria, many Irish people found it hard to understand how such abuse could have been allowed to continue for so long. How could a tight-knit community not have asked questions about the disappearance of a child? What did it say about Austrian culture that so many people preferred to treat what happened within a family home as purely private business?
Even before the emergence this week of the long-term neglect and/or abuse of six children in Roscommon, any sense of smugness or superiority in the face of such questions was already highly inappropriate to Irish circumstances. Leaving aside the continuing and deep-rooted failures to protect children against institutional and clerical abuse, we had three high-profile cases of familial abuse in the 1990s – the Kilkenny incest case, the Sophia McColgan case and the death of Kelly Fitzgerald. The general belief was that those cases had marked a watershed in social and political attitudes to child abuse.
Yet, 15 years after the publication of the Kilkenny incest report and 10 years after the publication of the McColgan report, we find ourselves confronted with horrific events that unfolded after that supposed watershed had been crossed. Official concerns about dangers to the Roscommon children date from 1996 – the year in which the report on the Kelly Fitzgerald case was making headlines. Yet the neglect and abuse of the Roscommon children continued for a further eight years, until they were finally taken into care.
The failure to remove these children from the intolerable situation they were in raises many questions. Some of them are institutional. Why did the health authorities not act sooner? Why did they apparently fail to follow up on the High Court order granted to their mother, preventing the children being taken into care in 2001? Some of the questions are legal and political. Why did the court grant that order? Why has the Government failed to keep its promises to bring forward an amendment to the Constitution to end parents’ dominion over their children”?
Perhaps the most important questions, however, are social. The children were failed, not just by politicians, social workers and the law but, as Judge Miriam Reynolds put it, by “everyone around them”. In a community that has been described by locals as “tight-knit”, it is not possible that no one saw the rats and mice that teemed around the house. It is not possible that teachers and other pupils at their school did not notice that these children were not toilet-trained, that they were crawling with headlice down their faces, and that they were unable to learn. The stark evidence of gross neglect was not simply visible, it was unavoidable.
To draw attention to this is not to excuse the failures of the health board, or of the political and legal systems. It is, rather, to remind us that we cannot become a society in which everyone assumes that responsibility for our fellow human beings lies only with laws and institutions. Child protection should be everyone’s business.