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'Hiding in plain sight - The social justice demands of today' (30.06.2009)

Address by Emily O'Reilly, Ombudsman at The Sisters of Charity's Conference, Dublin Castle

It took me a long time to begin to put my thoughts down on paper about the subject matter of this conference. When the invitation arrived from Sr Stan I immediately agreed to take part as the issue of social justice informs much of my work as Ombudsman and indeed as Information Commissioner, and because this conference might afford me an opportunity to look back at and update a widely reported address I made to the Ceifin Conference in 2004 when I reflected on Irish society at the height of the economic boom.

Then came the Ryan report and with it the shattering of so many lazy, unexplored assumptions about our past, about how we had imagined ourselves to be as a society. We stood exposed, not as an island of charming saints and chatty, avuncular scholars but as a repressed, cold hearted, fearful, smugly pious, sexually ignorant and vengeful race of self styled Christians. Above all the report exposed the unbridgeable gap between the teachings of Christ who preached nothing other than love, compassion and forgiveness and the grotesque perversion of those teachings by so many of those who claimed to follow him. As one priest commented, "The country became so Catholic, it forgot to be Christian."

I told Sr Stan that I could not ignore the report in this address and she readily agreed. I did say that it would not form the entire address, but my reflections on social justice now cannot be detached from the practice of social justice in the past - one must inform the other.

The Religious Institutions, including the order of the Sisters of Charity have taken much of the brunt of public criticism for what went on, the wholesale, systematic abuse of children. It is no surprise that this should be the case. The Institutions were the final and most visible concrete destination for the children handed down through a less immediately visible food chain that included virtually every other organ of the State from the courts and the judiciary, to a plethora of Government Departments through to organisations such as the ISPCC specifically charged with the care of children.

The hands and fists that descended on the bodies of the children were those of the people who worked in or who had access to the religious run institutions, yet the forces that enabled the abuse or turned blind, indifferent eyes to it ranged way beyond the institutions’ walls, present within the plusher offices of State, and the boardrooms of so called charitable institutions as well as within the dank, depressing, and frequently terrifying dormitories of the institutions themselves.

At its core, the Ryan report is a portrait of a society, of a time, a slice of our political and cultural history when, in the recent words of the new Abbot of Glenstal, Dom Mark Peter Hederman, the new Irish Free State, became "an alignment of nationalistic politics and the Roman Catholic Church which condemned those excluded from its criteria of acceptability, to a hell on earth."

It is strange at times to observe some of the reactions to the report, as though this new liberal, compassionate, progressive generation of the 21st century were alien observers of a new and horrible land. Some appear like shocked US soldiers stumbling into Belsen at the end of WW2. How could this have happened they wondered, what monsters did this?

The horrible truth of course is that there was no other, the monsters lived among us, some of the monsters were ourselves, no one invaded us and performed these execrable acts on our children, we did it all on our own. Contrary to the words of Jean Paul Sartre, Hell is not necessarily other people.

We didn’t know, is the constant refrain. Certainly, very few knew of the systemic nature of the abuse, of the near unbelievable extent and depravity of the sexual abuse in particular, of the political, bureaucratic and clerical cover ups but no adult living in Ireland throughout the period in question did not, in broad terms, know. If things were hidden, they were hidden in clear sight, the crocodile lines of boys and girls that streamed out of the institutions, the certain knowledge that corporal punishment at the very least was practised therein, the incarcerated Magdalene women in their Madonna blues and whites who walked the open streets of towns and villages in church processions. Judges knew, lawyers knew, teachers knew, civil servants knew, childcare workers knew, Gardai knew. Not to know was not an option.

To quote the report: Awareness of the abuse of children in schools and institutions was believed to exist within society at both official and unofficial levels. Professionals, including Government Inspectors, medical practitioners, and teachers had a role in relation to various aspects of children’s welfare while they were in schools and institutions. Local people were employed in most of the residential facilities as professional care, and ancillary staff. In addition, members of the public had contact with children in out-of-home care in the course of providing services to the institutions at both a formal and informal level. Witnesses commented that while many of those people were aware that life for children in the schools and institutions was difficult, they failed to take action to protect them."

We emerge shocked and horrified now, because we cannot grasp that what is shocking and horrifying now was the norm then. No one, or very few people, shouted stop because very few felt – it would appear - that there was anything that should be stopped. That society, our society, in the stranglehood of extreme nationalism laced with extreme Catholicism, held a particular view of children, of punishment, of unmarried mothers, of sexuality, of sin, of institutional care, of the rights of single parents, of the proper place of the poor. The view might seem alien now, but in those days, it was the Kerrygold butter of social justice – an integral, unquestioned ho hum part of what we were. The occasional voice that queried the right for example to physically punish children was silenced and ostracised.

I was struck by the enduring acceptance - even to this day - of corporal punishment as a reasonable act, by an article in the Irish Times recently when a man now in his seventies reflected on how, coming as he did from a middle class professional family he was spared the shocking level of physical punishment meted out to the underclass in the institutions or in the less salubrious schools of Dublin. He did get beaten he school, he admitted, but then he added, he deserved it.

He deserved it. I find it amazing to think how enduring that piece of indoctrination still is. He deserved to be physically assaulted because there can be no other description for it. And if he deserved it, then presumably the children in the institutions did too. And by what feat of fine calibration did he or others decide the point at which deserved physical assault amounted to underserved abuse. The truth was that at that time in Ireland, virtually every child got beaten at some point, and if some children got it worse in Institutions, well sure…they were possibly in need of greater taming than the rest. Another well trotted line from many older men is that, yes they were beaten, but sure it didn’t do them any harm. The thing that has long puzzled me is, how do they know?

Like others, I have been flailing around in the past few weeks, trying to understand, trying not to too narrowly condemn, weakened, humbled by the testimonies of survivors, flinching at the ongoing refusal in some quarters to let go the lawyers hand and face their own responsibility bravely and openly.

We all emerge from the Ryan report, if we are thinking people at all, somewhat lost, unbalanced, the touchstones of our former beliefs and certainties cast adrift. At Ceifin in 2004 I wondered what the real US actually was, the old style pious massgoers, or the new style materialists. I wonder even more now in the light of Ryan.

What also comes very sharply into focus is that the notion, the concept of social justice is not fixed. For much of the 20th century, right up to the year 1967, social justice was thought to include wide scale child migration, in other words, the live export of tens of thousands of destitute children mainly from the UK, to Canada and to Australia, most of them never again to see a family member, many, many of them to experience abuse of an identical kind to that reported on by Ryan often in institutions run by Irish brothers and nuns.

It's worth noting, as we contemplate the changing face and practice of social justice over time, that one of the organisations most involved in child migration, was Barnardos, although not, the Irish branch.

Its founder, a Dublin man Thomas Barnardo, and held to be a pioneer in child protection, honestly believed that that was an appropriate and humane way of helping children from troubled backgrounds to have a good life. And he got wide support for that view throughout the establishment. The economic undercurrent that ran through some of this philanthropy, the need for white labourers on Canadian and Australian farms, was, naturally, never mentioned during public defences of the practice, just as the economic exploitation of children in our own Institutions was really only exposed through Ryan.

In the late 1990s, a House of Commons committee - prompted as here by survivors stories and TV documentaries - went to Australia, interviewed over 200 survivors of child migration plus all the relevant parties involved in the scheme, and published a report that reads like a carbon copy of Ryan. The benign social justice of one generation had morphed into the hell on earth of the next.

So when we begin to think about social justice in this 21st century, and more specifically, as per the theme of this conference, social justice in a recession, we really do need to heed the lessons of Ryan, two of which are, that we should always challenge our assumptions about what constitutes good practice when it comes to dealing with vulnerable people in society, and that we should, if dealing with a social problem through the prism of ideology, secular or religious, be mindful that it is individual lives we are playing around with, not laboratory rats.

I have no doubt that every successive generation, like this one, believes that it has emerged into the light, has learnt the lessons of the past and goes forward into the newly disinfected dawn, with nothing less than pure altruism in its heart. That is never the case. We may think now that we have got it right vis a vis the rights of children, or the elderly, or people with disabilities, or immigrants, because we, after all, are the best educated, most liberal, progressive generation ever, but the lived reality is frequently otherwise, despite huge improvements in many areas of the social justice landscape.

Let me explain what I mean with a few examples. I referred earlier, to the social reality of the institutions as having been hidden in clear sight. Now every day, when I drive home from work, I pass down along the quays in front of the Custom House. There is one particular day every week, when I think a local methadone clinic dispenses and afterwards, the addicted clients of the clinic make their way to the seats around the quay and the steps of the Custom House where they congregate to chat and to socialise. Many of them look unwell, strung out, stumbling as they move about and many of them also are pushing buggies with babies inside or holding the hands of toddlers and young children. Some are drinking. My heart goes out to the adults because they are no doubt enduring their own personal hell, but my heart cries out for the children, for the immediate danger they may or may not be in, and for what lies ahead for their tiny, vulnerable selves.

When I first began to notice this phenomenon, something which the Irish Times journalist Roisin Ingle once described as the babies with the blue feet, I took to ringing the ISPCC to see if there was anything they could do. Invariably they would say that they would ring the Gardai and then invariably, nothing seemed to happen and after a while I stopped calling.

Now I have no doubt that there are huge legal, logistical, and even ethical issues around what constitutes the appropriate response by the State or by an external agency to the situation of these children. Years ago, they may well have been yanked away from their parents and placed in an institution; in these more enlightened days, no doubt every effort, rightly, is made to keep the family intact but is that, on occasion, simply a bureaucratic cop out? Do they live up to the spirit of what keeping the family intact mean? Do they put in the resources to make sure that the experience of family life is a positive one? Will the babies with the blue from the cold feet become the Ryan report of the next generation and will we even dare to say that we didn’t know, because we do know, because like the children of the institutions of old, the babies with the blue feet are hiding in clear sight.

Further down the quays, on the beautifully refurbished boardwalks, addicts still on heroin, not methadone, deal in clear sight. Migrant children beg in clear sight, just as Irish traveller children did and perhaps still do. Other migrant children go missing in clear sight from their state provided hostels. Children, barely out of infancy, act out criminal behaviour in the estates of Limerick, their parents incapable of their basic care, the State apparently helpless to act. Further up the road, in Belfast, when commenting in a vox pop about the racial attacks on members of the Roma community, a young woman, openly described them as "street rats" – a term as dehumanising as any applied to an ethnic minority, the comment a verbal licence to those who attack them.

As Ombudsman, I feel that my own personal response to this report – in a broad sense – is to point out where I see malfunctions within the state apparatus, malfunctions that lead to a less than socially just response to vulnerable people. After six years in the job, I have come to the view that public bodies and agencies begin to go bad when they begin to lose sight of why they are there in the first place, when they begin to put their own internal needs above the needs of those who they are there to support and to serve, when they begin to play in defence all of the time. What is needed above all in every public body, is a leadership of integrity, a leadership that viscerally understands what it is there to do, and who ensures that every single person in that organisation also understands that and employs it day after day in their work.

And if we, as a society, are actually to commit ourselves to social justice, we need to talk about what that means in practice and to examine and break down the barriers to achieving it. What do we want from our health service? What does a socially just health service mean? Does it mean equal access for all, regardless of income or do we – the better off in many cases – continue to put our own self-interest to the fore by seeking to protect and promote a system that no matter how it is spun, is most definitely two tier.

What about our nursing homes, our mental institutions, our prisons? We cannot be unaware of the huge problems besetting many of them, drab functionality at best, inhuman squalor at worst. We have blamed an older generation for hiding its own outcasts, yet we continue to do it in this generation, older people shuffled off to at times indifferent institutional care, people with mental or psychiatric problems shuffled off to equally dehumanising places, prisoners most of whom come from the same few square miles of disadvantaged concrete, bunking down in shower rooms for want of adequate space. The words "subhuman " and "degrading" were used or implied frequently in the Ryan report, the very same words have been used in inspection reports in relation to some of our current institutions that care for our old, out mentally ill and our imprisoned. The Minister for Health herself, just a few years ago, described the conditions in one mental institution as beyond her worst nightmare.

And this happens, all of this happens, because we – collectively – allow it to. There will be no marches on the streets around Leinster House on behalf of the prisoners or the mentally ill and the peeling paint in their rooms and the unsanitary conditions and the lack of privacy and stimulation, no Minister is going to be frightened by the baying of several thousand angry voices railing against the diet in an old person’s home or the fact that they all have to go to bed at the same time, like children, or the fact that they’re too intimidated to complain. It took young adults struggling to stay alive while ravaged by Cystic Fibrosis to painfully cough their way – from their hospital beds - through hour after hour of the Joe Duffy show before some movement was made in relation to special isolation wards where they could heal. Not so much hiding in clear sight as dying in clear sight.

And we scratch our heads and we wonder why this happens, but there is a simple fact about political life and that is, that it reacts to pressure. We would like to think that Governments get up every morning with a checklist of the higher virtues to hand, and tick them off one by one, but it doesn’t happen like that. Governments tend to mimic and react to the moral and ethical temperature of the people and if that isn’t particularly high at any point, then that checklist is cast aside. In other words, if we’re not too concerned about the mentally ill and the elderly and prisoners, then the Government isn’t gong to be overly motivated to act.

The wider public service also needs to face up to its social justice responsibilities. Outdated work practices, poor infrastructural planning, turf wars over the siting of desperately needed healthcare facilities, demarcation disputes, the jealous guarding of privileges- all of these are not just dry management and HR issues - but feed negatively into the social justice landscape.

In the past, we looked to the Church to give us moral leadership, there is little doubt but that the ability of the Church to give moral leadership at this juncture has been hugely compromised by recent events. It is hard to take lessons in morality from those whose own morality has been so called into question. This is not true of course of many many within the Church but the institutional church certainly stands indicted and we still await further child abuse reports over the coming months.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world", and I suppose, as we await a new force for moral leadership from whatever source, that is as much as any of us can do in our own individual lives. It is a much quoted line but a powerful one nonetheless. If there are only two lines of advice that we can give our children they are perhaps that one, and the Golden Rule, Do Unto others as you would do unto yourself. What more do we need to know?

I am aware of how difficult this time is for members of the religious institutions who have been called to account. If, as lay people, our presumptions about our society have been torn to shreds, what must it be like for you, to have part of the history of your order, an Order that you have invested your entire adult lives in and which has done so much good, presented to the world in a way which can only be distressing. Yet it must also be difficult to speak openly about that distress because of the far greater distress of the victims. But only you can forge your future, by addressing the past full square on and taking on board everything that implies, by striking out again, by going back to basics and asking the hard and difficult questions about your role both personally and as an Order.

I am also aware, as again, anyone with a thinking mind who reads the Ryan report should be, of how fragile civil society is, of how abuse can thrive cheek by jowl alongside civilised society and all of its trappings. In John Boyne’s book, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, he sites his concentration camp at the bottom of the garden of the privileged, middle class German family, the head of which goes on a daily basis from doting Dad to murderous camp commandant in the time it takes him to walk to the end of that garden. I am not making a holocaust analogy, but merely pointing out that abuse can thrive and walk among us and we either deliberately refuse to see it or whitewash out its every existence by pretending it is other than what it actually is. Or when we see the victims as lesser, as not quite fully human and therefore undeserving of our full protection. The woman in Belfast doesn’t see human beings walking down her street, she sees rats and has no shame in describing them as such.

Abuse thrives in those conditions, of secrecy sometimes but more so by a societal unwillingness to confront and challenge and name things as they truly are. Abuse also thrives when society remains indifferent to the abuse because it is by and large indifferent to the abused.

Time and time again, when somebody does shout stop and we listen, and we agonise over what went wrong, politicians or bureaucrats or priests or members of religious orders or whoever was in charge, trot out the line, "Mistakes were made." We need to confront that claim; were they mistakes or were they very deliberate decisions made in the full knowledge of the consequences. If we don’t confront that we will have many more Ryan reports in the future.

Finally, and rather co-incidentally, today is the last day of its separate, independent existence for the Combat Poverty Agency. In the 23 years of its existence as a statutory agency Combat Poverty has built up a well-earned reputation for solid research, for supporting anti-poverty initiatives at local, national and European level, and for providing objective, well-reasoned advice to Government across all policy areas which affect the poor – and that really means all policy areas. Combat Poverty, as many of you will know, has had considerable success in its efforts; though I have not time to go into these successes. Tomorrow, however, Combat Poverty will cease to exist; its functions and its staff will merge with the Social Inclusion Unit of the Department of Social and Family Affairs. Affairs In effect, Combat Poverty will become part of the civil service and will be directly answerable to the Minister for Social and Family Affairs.

While this decision on Combat Poverty was taken in the context of rationalising state agencies, many commentators and observers saw the decision as cynically opportunistic – a chance for Government to neutralise an agency whose independence could, at times, prove to be politically troublesome. I would hope that this view is itself cynical and not based in reality. The Secretary General to the Government, Dermot McCarthy, in a recent article effectively rejected this analysis and suggested that Combat Poverty's absorption into the civil service is a tribute to the success of the Agency and represents "the ultimate mainstreaming of the poverty challenge".

I mention all of this because the continuation of the work of Combat Poverty – free from political and bureaucratic pressures - will be crucial for the achievement of social justice in these recessionary times.

I choose to believe that the Secretary General to the Government is correct in his view and that Combat Poverty, in its new home, will continue to be an effective actor in the pursuit of social justice. However, for this to happen the work of the new DSFA Division, into which the Agency is being merged, will have to be treated as work for the people as a whole and not work on behalf of the Minister or of the Government. As I mentioned earlier, public bodies begin to go bad when they put their own internal needs before the needs of the people that body is meant to serve. Civil servants are reared on the doctrine of the need to protect their Minister and this can be at the expense of serving the needs of the people who pay their salaries. I would hope, as has always been the case hitherto, that all of the research work conducted or commissioned by the new DSFA Division, and all of its policy advice, will be published as a matter of course and at the earliest opportunity. People, I hope, will not have to rely on Freedom of Information requests to have access to the output of the new Division. In short, I hope and expect that the work of Combat Poverty in its new home will be as extensive, as objective and as accessible as has been the case this past 23 years. Anything less will mean that the pursuit of social justice and indeed the principle of open government will have been dealt a serious blow.

Respect for the poor, I am told, was a key tenet in the teaching of Mary Aikenhead; this, she said, involves acceptance. On a personal level, as Mary Aikenhead put it (and here I'm quoting how Sr. Stan put it in a published article) respect is about waiting, listening, not judging. It is about letting every person know that they are important. It is about giving to the poor, as Mary Aikenhead said, what the rich can buy with money.

Applying this to the relationship between people and Government, respect requires that Government share with the people all of the information, research and analysis which it has available to it. This, I hope, will be the hallmark of the approach adopted in the future by the Department of Social and Family Affairs and, indeed, all other Departments.

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