Tom Inglis: Sex Crimes for God's Sake

Tom Inglis provides an eagle-eyed analysis of why Irish society could have tolerated prolonged institutional abuse of children in his article in the Irish Times on Saturday 30th May 2009 - extract follows:

..."Bourdieu, another French theorist, argued that there is a realm of thought called doxa: a realm of unquestioned orthodoxy in which things cannot be thought or let alone said. There was only ever one form of bad thought in Catholic Ireland.

It is when we put these two factors together, the huge numbers of reformatories and industrial schools in Ireland and the silence about sex, that we get the type of sadism and sexual perversion.

The absence of any thinking outside the box, let alone criticism and resistance, meant that very few people questioned the policy, particularly of religious Brothers, of taking young boys, barely teenagers, and sending them off to novitiate houses. Those who ran these novitiates operated within forms of repression, discipline and control that were copied in the schools.

The young men and women who ran these schools were servants of a system of power that was beyond question, they were Roman foot-soldiers. They were caught in a regime of Catholic thought and practice from which, effectively, there was little escape. There was no mechanism by which they could talk about themselves, their desires and frustrations. They took their anger out on the children. The children became their scapegoats..."

Read it all at: How we became an international disgrace - The Irish Times - Sat, May 30, 2009