Suffer Little Children

Fintan O' Toole's article "Law of anarchy, cruelty of care" written in the Irish Times newspaper Saturday 23rd May a couple of days after the release of the Government-approved report on Institutional Child Abuse, is a comprehensive analysis of how such dark days could come to pass:

"...Such institutions are not rare, but they are usually associated either with totalitarian regimes or with the brutalising effects of war. Ireland did not have a totalitarian regime, nor was it at war, but it managed to create, especially for poor children, the effects of both conditions. Some of the methods used in the industrial schools are queasily reminiscent of images from gulags or concentration camps: the shaved heads; the use of humiliation and disorientation to destroy the inmate’s sense of personal identity; the turning of fire hoses on inmates; the setting of dogs on inmates; the beating of inmates while they were hanging from hooks on a wall. Dr Norman Stewart, who lived beside Artane industrial school, and later beside Dachau, was struck, as he wrote to The Irish Times, by the similar local experience of “observing lines of desultory prisoners as they trudged through the neigh- bourhood on their way to and from their workplaces”.

And the effect on inmates, as one survivor explained, was very like that of having been in a war: “It’s like men at war who experi- ence things cannot bring these things back to people in the street because people would not under- stand the situation that they were in. They dehumanised themselves. They dehumanised their enemy in order to be able to psychologically deal with killing them. The same is true when I came out of Daingean and I am looking at all of these people in the street and I am thinking they don’t know where I have been and they couldn’t understand me...

...WITH THIS DEGREE OF outside knowledge, the internal culture of brutality should not have sur- vived. It did so for three reasons: power, sex and class. The perpetrators abused chil- dren because they could..."

The full article is at:
Law of anarchy, cruelty of care - The Irish Times - Sat, May 23, 2009