Clerical Abuse Protest

by trev Mon Jan 25, 2010 13:12

The Dail promised safeguards fifty years ago . Mickey Flanagan's mother was able to get the assault on her son raised in the Dail in 1954 .The Minister of Education at the time a Mr Moylan , told the Dail in response to a question raised "This is an isolated incident ,it can only happen again as an accident" .
http://www.ercbna.org/Protection/index.as

There was an elite circle that covered up for abuse down the years. It was only the people who were abused themselves and their families who kept hammering away to bring the sordid affair out into the open. John Cooney wrote in the Irish Independent after the publication of Ryan ,
" Archbishop Martin has stood by his affirmation that the kind of anecdotal information about poor child care and physical abuse in Artane, about which he learned while a 20-year-old seminarian in the mid 1960s, was common knowledge and openly discussed at that time in social work, child care and probation circles. "

The Irish Times today reports the result of an MRIB poll . 74% of those asked felt that the church had not responded adequately to the Murphy report ,only 16% thought the response adequate. That's exactly the way people were talking on the street on Saturday . The government and church authorities still seem to be in denial about the way people feel . Some of us on the stand spoke to a couple in their seventies who asked how they could go about formally disassciating from the church. A seventeen year old schoolgirl came up to us and said that she had read the whole of the Ryan Report and it had turned her stomach . The girl showed it to her mother who said that she would never set foot in a church again.

This thing goes across the generations . Our group is informal ,but we are starting to get a bit better organized than we were and intend to keep the pressure on . We will not allow the Christian Brothers to rehabilitate themselves as the Edmund Rice Institute. One strike and you're out must be the rule for any organization that has knowingly moved abusers about from school to school . The people of Ireland are never going to go back to the way things were .

Support our protest every Saturday outside the GPO . Frank has just set up a message board which we will link to as soon as we find out how to it all works . Thanks again everybody.