Pope should visit Tuam - Cllr Bree

COUNCILLOR Declan Bree says the Pope should visit Tuam during his trip to Ireland in August to apologise to the families of those who suffered and died in the Mother and Baby Home run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours and to all the victims of clerical abuse in Ireland.

Cllr Bree’s motion to this effect was seconded by Clr Gino O’Boyle at a meeting of the County Council and unanimously passed.

“Over the decades an estimated 10,000 women and girls were forced to work in the Magdalene laundries run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Religious Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

“Unmarried mothers, women with learning disabilities and girls who had been abused were forced to enter these workhouses, where they suffered a cruel regime of terror and punishment behind locked doors, with no wages and no option to leave.

“The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse described the rape and molestation as “en- demic” in catholic church-run industrial schools and orphanages. The sheer scale and longevity of the torment inflicted on defenceless children – over 800 known abusers in over 200 Catholic institutions made it clear that it was not accidental or opportunistic but systematic.

“Terror was both the point of these institutions and their standard operating procedure. Their function in Irish society was to impose social control, particularly on the working class and on the poor.

“Within the institutions, terror was systematic and deliberate. It was a methodology handed down through “successive generations of Brothers, priests and nuns.

“We read of children “flogged, kicked, scalded, burned and held under water”. We read of deliberate psychological torment inflicted through humiliation, expressions of contempt and the practice of incorrectly telling children that their parents were dead. We read of returned absconders having their heads shaved and of “ritualised” floggings.”