Post by Wasp on Oct 27, 2009 20:09:04 GMT
Monument to victims of abuse is an insult
Irish Independent. Friday 23rd October 2009
The proposed €500,000 “memorial to victims of child abuse” (Aine Kerr, Letters, October 19) bearing the words of Mr Bertie Ahern’s 1999 “apology” to Ireland’s former child prisoners is an expensive and offensive political gesture.
The planned structure is not a memorial to the victims; it is a monument to Mr Ahern, a former Taoiseach whose utterances few take seriously now.
Readers may remember that in 1999 Mr Ahern (then Taoiseach) issued the following statement, which is now to appear on the memorial:
“On behalf of the State and all the citizens of the State, 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”.
That statement is not an apology but a denial and a deception. It is simply not true to say that the State failed to detect the pain being suffered by the child prisoners. Time and again that pain was reported to the State and the politicians each time dismissed the reports and tried to discredit the messenger.
Even Fr Flanagan, an Irish American priest who in 1946, drew attention to the ill-treatment of the child prisoners was dismissed as a liar by the Minister for Education, Sean Moylan in the Dail.
Besides, the State’s reformatory rules, which were published for all to read, authorised the infliction of pain upon the inmates.
Naked flogging of the child prisoners was approved and condoned by successive Ministers for Education and their inspectors into the 1990s.
Only in Ahern logic can you authorise violence and then deny all knowledge of it.
A memorial bearing Mr Ahern’s fake apology will be a permanent reminder of Ireland’s denial and a standing offence to its former child prisoners.
The Ryan Report on Ireland’s child prisons (May, 2009) recommended the construction of the memorial and claimed, with Ahern-type logic, that the structure would somehow “alleviate … the effects of abuse on those who suffered”!
But Justice Sean Ryan failed to explain how Bertie’s denial carved in stone would work its magic on the former child prisoners.
I escaped from Artane prison and from Ireland in 1963. I am one of many thousands of child prison refugees. Ireland denies me the simple justice I request, namely, the recision of the illegal detention order that put me in Artane.
Consequently, I shall renounce Irish nationality and never set foot in Ireland again. I will therefore, thankfully, never experience the memorial’s miraculous healing powers.
The memorial is a political stunt. It has nothing whatever to do with alleviating the suffering of the victims. It has to do with salving the collective conscience of a nation racked by unacknowledged guilt for the mass-persecution of its children in the post-independence era. It is a monumental insult to Ireland’s former child prisoners.
JIM BERESFORD
FORMER ARTANE CHILD PRISONER 14262
SALENDINE NOOK, HUDDERSFIELD
Irish Independent. Friday 23rd October 2009
The proposed €500,000 “memorial to victims of child abuse” (Aine Kerr, Letters, October 19) bearing the words of Mr Bertie Ahern’s 1999 “apology” to Ireland’s former child prisoners is an expensive and offensive political gesture.
The planned structure is not a memorial to the victims; it is a monument to Mr Ahern, a former Taoiseach whose utterances few take seriously now.
Readers may remember that in 1999 Mr Ahern (then Taoiseach) issued the following statement, which is now to appear on the memorial:
“On behalf of the State and all the citizens of the State, 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”.
That statement is not an apology but a denial and a deception. It is simply not true to say that the State failed to detect the pain being suffered by the child prisoners. Time and again that pain was reported to the State and the politicians each time dismissed the reports and tried to discredit the messenger.
Even Fr Flanagan, an Irish American priest who in 1946, drew attention to the ill-treatment of the child prisoners was dismissed as a liar by the Minister for Education, Sean Moylan in the Dail.
Besides, the State’s reformatory rules, which were published for all to read, authorised the infliction of pain upon the inmates.
Naked flogging of the child prisoners was approved and condoned by successive Ministers for Education and their inspectors into the 1990s.
Only in Ahern logic can you authorise violence and then deny all knowledge of it.
A memorial bearing Mr Ahern’s fake apology will be a permanent reminder of Ireland’s denial and a standing offence to its former child prisoners.
The Ryan Report on Ireland’s child prisons (May, 2009) recommended the construction of the memorial and claimed, with Ahern-type logic, that the structure would somehow “alleviate … the effects of abuse on those who suffered”!
But Justice Sean Ryan failed to explain how Bertie’s denial carved in stone would work its magic on the former child prisoners.
I escaped from Artane prison and from Ireland in 1963. I am one of many thousands of child prison refugees. Ireland denies me the simple justice I request, namely, the recision of the illegal detention order that put me in Artane.
Consequently, I shall renounce Irish nationality and never set foot in Ireland again. I will therefore, thankfully, never experience the memorial’s miraculous healing powers.
The memorial is a political stunt. It has nothing whatever to do with alleviating the suffering of the victims. It has to do with salving the collective conscience of a nation racked by unacknowledged guilt for the mass-persecution of its children in the post-independence era. It is a monumental insult to Ireland’s former child prisoners.
JIM BERESFORD
FORMER ARTANE CHILD PRISONER 14262
SALENDINE NOOK, HUDDERSFIELD
