Speech to the Irish Labour Party Conference accepting The James Larkin Justice Award.

May 2003

Every now and again in our history, not from achievement but from adversity, we are faced with an opportunity to learn more about who we are. Often this opportunity comes because we uncover more of our darkness, our capacity to hurt and abuse others. Ireland has had to face much of its darkness in recent years. We have had to face the ways in which we have created a society that allowed the exploitation and rape of hundreds of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens. A society where our need for comfort, for belief in our own self-serving and self-deluded goodness was more important that the needs of our children. We needed to believe that if we prayed, confessed, followed the word of our religious and political leaders then all was well. We created a society in which all was well, in which those who’s suffering denied that reality were silenced and brutalised. Now we must face that truth, we must own our part in it. It is not simply enough to blame the State or the Church. Ireland has been an independent state since 1922 and though we inherited much of our system of Government from the British model we have adapted that system to our own needs. We have for eight decades been the masters of our own destiny. Ireland is a republic, a society based on the ideals of republican democracy. Our constitution states that all legislative, executive and judicial powers of Government derive from the people. It is in our name that children have been brutalised, it is power that was derived from us, the people that allowed such abuse. And we are therefore collectively responsible, not to blame, not personally at fault as individuals but responsible. What was done was done in our names. We created our society. We are each uniquely part of that system. We must name what we have done, what we have allowed to be done.

“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamour of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
- Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr.

Our silence has been active, not passive. Responsibility means that we posses the ability to respond and we did not respond. Our silence names our failure. The level of our courage and determination must now equal that of out silence thus far: we must put as much energy and effort into acknowledging the truth of child abuse in our society as we have into denying its existence and silencing its victims in the past. Its not that we didn’t know, it’s that we didn’t chose to speak, to name what we knew. So often I asked those who lived within the community where I was abused “Didn’t you know?” Shockingly I was told on numerous occasions that they knew. That people joked about not bending down in front of my abuser. One person told me “people would tell you, but they wouldn’t really tell you”. We have spoken in whispers of the evils that have been perpetrated within our society. We have sought and enjoyed the thrill of scandal and gossip and we have done so in a way that meant we could say “we didn’t really know”.

Well now we know. We can no longer sit in comfortable self-deluded ignorance. We know. So what do we do now? How do we respond? Will our system of justice provide us with the way forward? It seems unlikely. Whilst I have personally recently achieved a level of justice in my own case it is worth noting that it took eight years to get to that point and considerable effort on the part of myself and my legal team. The Criminal justice system to which I initially turned failed to bring my case to any conclusion. It was a moment of real personal liberation to achieve that significant a level of justice for myself but the fact remains that for the vast majority of those sexually abused as children in Ireland such justice will never be achieved.

Justice cannot simply be about right and wrong, about judgement and vengeance. If justice cannot see the humanity in a situation, if it doesn’t seek that humanity but only sees the players as objects, as victims or offenders then it fails. If the law is simply a rigid, unyielding structure then it fails. If truth becomes less important than the mechanics of law, if the battle of wills between advocates becomes more important than the real human stories in every case then justice cannot be real.

In our system we worry about abuse of process, not abuse of principle, of ideal. It seems that justice has become that: a process not an ideal, not an aim in itself. J Edgar Hoover once proclaimed that “Justice is incidental to law and order”. At times it seems that’s the truth of our own system. Nowhere is that more evident than in how that system responds to the rape and abuse of children.

Even where we can name the offender and those responsible our system of justice seems incapable of responding. In most cases we can’t even get past the first hurdle, cases fall by the wayside when the DPP decides not to proceed. The victim is again abandoned and failed by our system and with no reason given, no explanation. Decisions are taken in private and never disclosed. There may well be sound legal reasons for this but there can be no learning if there is no opportunity to examine failures that are not named, decisions that cannot be challenged.

Even if the case gets to court, many are thrown out. Time has passed, the offender is old. The files vanished, the crimes forgotten by all but the victim. Not enough evidence, not enough proof, just shattered lives that are littered with the impact of the harm done, harm that does and should be seen to tell the story but is now used to discredit the victim. The victim is unreliable, has a criminal record, has used drugs, is an alcoholic or has a history of psychiatric illness. A prosecution is not in the public interest. How can it be in the public interest to leave such unspeakable acts unaddressed? If we examine existing statistics on the reporting and conviction rates for sexual violence we can establish that only half of one percent of all cases of result in a conviction. Half of one percent! Think of it, in 99.5% of all cases justice is not achieved through our criminal justice system. How can that be in the public interest? How can it be in the public interest that over one million people in this country have been sexually abused as children in their churches, in their families, schools, hospitals and communities and our systems of justice are incapable of responding to that harm? How can it be in the public interest for us to loose that much human potential? Can we afford that?

Today I am here to receive an award, an award that marks my contribution to social justice. The fact that I am receiving this award from the Labour Party which has since its foundation worked to achieve real social justice in Ireland has particular significance for me. The truth is though that were it not for the capacity of those who helped me to emerge from the harm and hurt caused me I would not be here. If you feel moved by my actions, that the things I do matter and make this society a richer, more just place then think what could be achieved if we could give others what I was so lucky to receive.

There are times when it’s hard to receive such encouragement and support. I think “Where were you when I was struggling, when I couldn’t cope and couldn’t speak?” I sit with others who cannot speak, who cannot cope, who cannot be what we value in this society. Who are not “functional” or articulate, who can only speak of their agony by turning it inwards, by harming themselves through self-hatred, drugs, alcohol or by slashing their bodies in an attempt to express their pain. I am the acceptable face of sexual abuse and that is not ok. Now that I have a home people invite me to theirs, now that I can feed myself people buy me dinner. It’s good, it’s great and I appreciate it…but it’s strange. It’s extraordinary to find myself walking the same streets as I did at 17 when I was homeless and have people look at me, before they looked away.

For all of the money and resources that have been devoted to the response to sexual abuse, in particular institutional abuse what have we achieved? Have victims achieved justice? Has our attitude to them changed? In many ways it would appear not. We still seem to fear and seek to blame those brutalised children who are now adults. It has been reported that senior civil servants advised the Government that a truth commission for those abused in industrial schools was ill-advised as they feared “crackpots or people who have axes to grind”. They also cautioned that a “significant number” of the victims are “dysfunctional people in our society . . . some of whom may pose a risk to themselves and to others, in particular children”. So we are still judging not those who failed those children but the children themselves. We fear that they have an axe to grind…too right they do! And it still appears that our fear at facing our collective shame for what was done to them in our name leads us to judge and further silence them. It would appear that real justice for those of our fellow citizens who were so horrifically abused in “Care” still seems a long way off.

There have been notable developments. The Redress Board offers a level of acknowledgement, of compensation. It is one half of restorative justice, but it is lacking. It will not name the truth of what those children suffered. It would appear that nothing will. For many of our children who suffered so appallingly there is no light, nothing that uncovers the shadow. In so many cases there is no prosecution, no response. There will be no prosecution in many hundreds of cases where children have been brutalised, raped, sodomised, beaten, degraded, starved, deprived and exploited. Even on the most basic level our system of justice has failed them. No-one is held to account and now all we worry about is the money. Who will pay? Has the Church contributed enough? All real and valid concerns but what has happened to our compassion? Who cares? Perhaps we don’t know how to respond. Perhaps its time to name that, perhaps we also need to let ourselves off the hook a little and own our fears and failures. Then maybe, just maybe we can find a way through. Maybe we can then stop trying to make what is a fundamentally flawed system work and instead design a system of justice that work towards the ideal, towards the principles of truth, fairness, integrity and right. Without these principles there can be no justice. Without them justice is just a process, nothing more than that, just a word.

It is an incredible privilege to be here today to receive this award, thank you for this honour which I am delighted and more than a little humbled to accept. I accept it in the spirit it is given and in the memory of James Larkin. I accept it in the name of those of our citizens yet to achieve justice, those of our brothers and sisters who we must now support in moving through and beyond the trauma that has so devastated their lives. If we as a republican democracy are truly committed to the ideals of social justice then surely that is the very least that we are required to do.

Thank you.