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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2022
The Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is the map of an Irish hell. It defines the contours of a dark hinterland of the State, a parallel country whose existence we have long known but never fully acknowledged. It is a land of pain and shame, of savage cruelty and callous indifference. The instinct to turn away from it, repelled by its profoundly unsettling ugliness, is almost irresistible. We owe it, though, to those who have suffered there to acknowledge from now on that it is an inescapable part of Irish reality. We have to deal with the now-established fact that, alongside the warmth and intimacy, the kindness and generosity of Irish life, there was, for most of the history of the State, a deliberately maintained structure of vile and vicious abuse. (The Irish Times, 21 May 2009: 19)
The publication of the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (which will be referred to here as the Ryan Report) during 2009 was a seminal event, not only in the vindication of the human rights of survivors of child abuse in Irish reformatory and industrial schools, but also in the journey towards truth-telling about child abuse. The Ryan Report is 2,600 pages in length and is composed of five volumes. It contains the testimony of over 1,500 witnesses and when it was published it exposed a mephitic hole in Irish society. It is a powerfully revelatory document that stands as a unique testament to child suffering in the modern world. However, in terms of truth-telling it is arguably a flawed document because the alleged perpetrators of abuse (living and dead) have been given anonymity following legal action, but, on the other hand, the danger of a witch-hunt was avoided by taking this approach. Furthermore, the original Chair of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), Justice Mary Laffoy, resigned in 2003 because of an alleged lack of official cooperation, notably on the part of the Department of Education (Arnold, 2009: 98-109). She was replaced by Justice Sean Ryan. The Ryan Report reveals that child abuse was endemic in the industrial and reformatory school system in Ireland. The shocking revelations it contains have been reported around the world, exposing the failure of Ireland's human rights record in relation to children to critical international scrutiny.
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