Conspiracy of silence must not endure

FOLLOWING our revelation last week of sexual abuse claims against Bishop Eamonn Casey, we now know that the number of women who have made official claims is four. A further two women contacted the Church in the UK, where the bishop served in the Sixties, because they wanted to share similar stories but they did not pursue the matter legally.

The case we highlighted last week was that of Patricia Donovan, a niece of Casey’s who says he raped her for a decade from the age of five. Today we tell the story of another woman who suffered abuse by Casey. In emotional oral testimony to a survivors’ group before her death, she told how she and others in Magdalene laundries were beaten ‘like dogs’ and lived in fear of rape by priests.

The woman even saw a nun fall to the floor and give birth, and believes the father of the baby was a priest.

This woman could not reveal in her own lifetime that Bishop Casey was her abuser because, like all who entered the Redress Board programme, her compensation was conditional on signing a confidentiality clause. She was silenced.

The Redress Board, for all the good it has done in compensating victims of clerical abuse, is another example of the collusion between Church and State when it comes to scrutiny of the horrors of Church-run industrial schools and laundries. It was the State that sent children and young women into these insitututions and its inspectors must have known what was going on.

Dispiritingly, we still see today how Church and State alike seek only to protect themselves. Relatives of the Tuam babies, have been denied their right to learn how their infant siblings died.

The Retention of Records Bill is a piece of legislation that, in the guise of protecting victims, is actually designed to protect Church and State from exposure. The Bill is awaiting Dáil approval and would seal for 75 years all records on child abuse handled in the Ryan Report and by the Redress Board.

The State papers are released after 30 years, so why the need for a blackout more than twice that length? It can only be to protect those still living, but who will be long dead before accounts of their abuse - and in the case of the State, the extent of its collusion - is revealed.

Laura Angela Collins, the daughter of a Magdalene survivor, has launched a petition to stop the Retention of Records Bill from passing into law and we agree that it should be ditched. The only people who should hold a veto on whether or not their settlements and stories remain confidential are the victims themselves.

A frank, open discussion of abuse is the only thing that will heal so many of this country’s open, weeping wounds.