A chara, – As a survivor, I wish to express my gratitude to to the scoping inquiry team.
The scoping inquiry report is a solid document.
That the scoping inquiry team requested and the Minister for Education granted them the extra time to drill into the data and information they had collected, so that they could subject it to critical analysis, was a sound decision.
Reading through the report is a sobering experience, an informative and devastating outline of the scale and force of the crimes of sexual, bodily and psychic nature committed upon us as children, and the symptoms of same which we survivors have been forced to endure, through no fault or flaw in ourselves, all our lives.
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The fault and flaws lay with the perpetrators; and with the church, the congregations and the State and its organs where they failed to protect our human rights, our dignity and safety.
I am sure the Irish people would wish to correct that unhappy condition.
It struck me today as I was reading the report, that had such a process been carried out in 2000, when it was clear that there was at the very least a risk of a substantive case to answer within the Irish schools system, given the numbers of cases already extant at the time, and the knowledge, since the suppressed Carrigan report of 1931, of the prevalence of child sexual abuse and of physical and psychological abuse of children in Ireland, how different would the outcomes have been for all the survivors over the past 24 years – many have not survived, and they will never see justice or accountability for their suffering. Their loss is our nation’s loss too.
And they lost so much more than we. Life is precious, a gift not to be squandered by neglect to meet the needs of the people and their children.
I understand that many elements of the current scoping inquiry were not in place at the time, and that my thoughts are of possibilities rather than realities, and that time cannot be rolled back.
The work and effort of survivors to seek justice over the past 30 years has made the present situation possible.
The ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that the State was negligent in failing to protect a citizen from abuse in a primary school ought to have been implemented in 2014, at pace.
We move forward in this generation, cautiously. Step by step.
I respectfully urge the Taoiseach, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Justice, and the Oireachtas to seize the day, to act upon that ruling, and in accepting the State’s responsibility, on behalf of the Irish people, and our children, that they move the process onward, as soon as possible, as a way to set the most apt conditions for the forthcoming commission of investigation, affording survivors the help they so desperately need and deserve, ensuring that it is not contingent upon the outcome of that commission of investigation. – Yours, etc,
CORNELIUS CROWLEY,
London.