A land fit for children

It's true that there are no easy answers. However there are things about which we can be certain. Like this: Ireland is a far better place for children to grow up in now, than it was twenty or thirty years ago.

I know that there are people who don't like to hear this. There's a conservative rump out there who resist the assertion that Irish society has progressed immeasurably since the late 1960s.

They talk about the breakdown in authority. They bemoan the loss of religious belief. They anguish over the collapse of the nuclear family. They point to the increase in male suicides. They worry about the effect of the influx of people of different nationalities to Ireland (if we can't take care of our own, they ask disingenuously, how are we going to be able to take care of these newcomers?) And they generally look back with nostalgia at a time when everything here was more ordered, more fixed and more isolated from the influences of the rest of the world. We knew then what we were and who we were – or so the line of thinking goes. Now, there is... chaos. Well, if that's the case, give me chaos any day. Because there is no doubt, in my mind, about it – it's far better than what passed for civilisation in Ireland before.

During the past week, the body of William Delaney was exhumed from a graveyard in Kilkenny. William was the eldest of ten children born into a traveller family that had settled on the perimeter of Kilkenny city in the late 1960s. In 1967, at the age of ten, he became involved in a break-in at a meat factory in Waterford and as a result was dispatched to the legendary industrial school run by the Christian Brothers at Letterfrack in county Galway.

Letterfrack was legendary for all the wrong reasons. It was a byword, even at the time, for violence, intimidation and fear. Children generally – and certainly those who were at Christian Brothers schools – knew that it was a place to be avoided at all costs. And they were right – indeed just how right is only now emerging fully into the shocked light of day.

The Gardaí have been investigating allegations of brutality – of sexual and physical abuse – in Letterfrack. To date there have been nineteen arrests of people who worked in the reform school – most of them current or former Christian Brothers. Files that contain horrific reports of violence being routinely and systematically perpetrated on the children who were misfortunate enough to find themselves in this grim institution have been sent to the director of public prosecutions and it is expected that prosecutions will follow.

William Delaney's body was exhumed as part of these investigations. He died, back at his home in Kilkenny, during the summer of 1970. The death certificate recorded encephalitis – or an inflammation of the brain – as the cause. But what had given rise to the inflammation? Thirty years on, a new post mortem has just confirmed that he died of an untreated ear infection. The suggestion that a blow to the head caused his death has now been proved erroneous, although it is widely believed that in the three years he spent in Letterfrack, he suffered neglect and abuse at the hands of some of the Brothers before becoming ill in July 1970. It is surely symptomatic that the illness was never treated.

Letterfrack is, of course, just the most awful example of what we all know now to have been an appalling regime of abuse of children, which was carried on in Ireland, in particular in orphanages and reform schools run either by the State or, on its behalf, by religious orders. Nor was it confined to these institutions. In schools all over the country – and especially in those run by the Christian Brothers, and by other celibate male religious – it was a matter of routine that children were physically and verbally abused on a grand and vicious scale.

It was a daytime nightmare that made the prospect of going to school at all a sickening one for hundreds of thousands of children from the age of eight upwards. Lots of kids hated school and everything to do with it, with a fierce but unrequited loathing. Others were merely gripped with a massive apprehension about what each day would bring – what horrors might unfold, what violence they might be subjected to or what brutality they might witness being inflicted on others (and in which they might therefore feel some kind of guilt-inducing complicity).

There are many changes in Irish society that have taken place over the past thirty years about which I feel a deep sense of gratitude. But there is none that even remotely compares with the sense of satisfaction – the sense of release – that I feel about the extent of the transformation that has occurred in the experience of children in education generally. Being able to go to school free of the constant threat of imminent violence is the single most important change to have taken place in Irish society, opening up a whole new sense of possibility in those who are passing through the system.

The benefits of that change feed on through into every aspect of Irish life. When we attempt to analyse the differences of ambition and achievement that have been central to the success which this country has enjoyed in so many spheres over the past decade, this should always be recognised as a central contributing factor. There was a poison in Irish society that was inflicted on the young citizens of this country when they were at their most vulnerable. That children no longer have to ingest this, and to live with it and its effects on a daily basis, is simply wonderful – and the benefits, I believe, are apparent in every aspect of Irish life.

How did those who were responsible get away with brutalising and intimidating children for so long? It is important to ask this question – and to answer it unflinchingly. They got away with it for so long because of the authoritarianism that was central to the way in which the State was run. And we must be clear about why the State was run in this way: it is because the Republic of Ireland was then a Catholic state for a Catholic people and authoritarianism was and is absolutely central to the Catholic religion – and to the Catholic vision of the nuclear family, and its role in society.

The breakdown in this kind of authoritarianism was absolutely necessary for the psychic health of this country. The overthrow of the Catholic church from its special position in the Constitution was essential – for the good of the children of Ireland. And the collapse of all the assumptions about the nuclear family that were part of the same view of the world was also a good thing.

Life for the children of the nation is far from perfect now, and there's a hell of a challenge facing us all, in the need to turn our society into one that genuinely nurtures, takes care of and loves its children adequately. But we are far closer to that ideal now than we were in the dark days of religious brutality and authoritarian rule. The garda investigation into the ugliness of Letterfrack is confirmation of that.

And anyone who says differently needs their head examined.