The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) is one of a range of measures introduced by the Irish Government to investigate the extent and effects of abuse on children from 1936 onwards. It is commonly known in Ireland as the Ryan Commission (previously "the Laffoy Commission"), after its chair, Justice Seán Ryan. Judge Laffoy resigned on 2 September 2003, following a departmental review on costs and resources. She felt that: "...the cumulative effect of those factors effectively negated the guarantee of independence conferred on the Commission and militated against it being able to perform its statutory functions." The Commission's work started in 1999 and it published its public report, commonly referred to as the Ryan report, on 20 May 2009.
The Commission's remit was to investigate all forms of child abuse in Irish institutions for children; the majority of allegations it investigated related to the system of sixty residential "Reformatory and Industrial Schools" operated by Catholic Church orders, funded and supervised by the Irish Department of Education.
The Commission's report said testimony had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential, that some religious officials encouraged ritual beatings and consistently shielded their orders amid a "culture of self-serving secrecy", and that government inspectors failed to stop the abuses.
Among the more extreme allegations of abuse were beatings and rapes, subjection to naked beatings in public, being forced into oral sex and even subjection to beatings after failed rape attempts by brothers. The abuse has been described by some as Ireland's Holocaust. The abuse was said to be "endemic" in the institutions that dealt with boys. The UK based Guardian newspaper, described the abuse as "the stuff of nightmares", citing the adjectives used in the report as being particularly chilling: "systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary, endemic".
The Report's conclusions section (Chapter 6) supports the overall tenor of the accusations without exception. However, the Commission's recommendations were restricted in scope by two rules imposed by the Irish government, and therefore do not include calls for the prosecution or sanction of any of the parties involved.
Read more about Commission To Inquire Into Child Abuse: Background, Continuance By Irish Free State, Reform Starts in The 1960s, The CICA Legislation, 1999-2005, Establishment and Functions, Public Report, 2002 Compensation Deal and The Question of Blame, Church of Ireland Institutions, Trudder House
Famous quotes containing the words commission, inquire, child and/or abuse:
“Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.”
—Marian Wright Edelman (20th century)
“I wish more and more that health were studied half as much as disease is. Why, with all the endowment of research against cancer is no study made of those who are free from cancer? Why not inquire what foods they eat, what habits of body and mind they cultivate? And why never study animals in health and natural surroundings? why always sickened and in an environment of strangeness and artificiality?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1976–1959)
“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding—and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (20th century)
“You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry ...”
—Bible: Hebrew, Exodus 22:22,23.