By Allison Bray
Friday November 06 2009
Outspoken abuse campaigner Christine Buckley was honoured by
President Mary McAleese last night after being named Ireland's Volunteer of the Year.The survivor of industrial school abuse and co-founder of the Aislinn Eduation and Support Centre for survivors of institutional abuse was chosen for her tireless efforts fighting for the rights of those abused as children while in care.
Mrs McAleese said Ms Buckley represented "a constituency of men, women and children whose lives were cruelly and appallingly skewed out of shape because of their experience of institutional abuse".
"Those stories were brought to the surface of Irish society and we now face into their consequences and their legacy, chastened, humbled and determined that such things must never be allowed to occur again here," Mrs McAleese said.
"We should also be determined that the story of Ireland's abused, who won their own vindication, who insisted and still insist on full accountability, will be an encouragement to those abused elsewhere in the world."
Ms Buckley received the award at a ceremony at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, in Dublin as part of the Ireland Involved Awards.
Ms Buckley will now go on to represent Ireland at the celebration of volunteers in the European Parliament in December.
The judging panel said they had been impressed by Ms Buckley's "sustained commitment to helping survivors".
Ms Buckley first went public about her own abuse in 1992 and was instrumental in making the documentaries 'Dear Daughter' and 'States of Fear', which exposed the industrial school abuse scandal.
Her efforts also led to victims getting an official apology from former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern along with a promise to provide further compensation.
- Allison Bray
My mother-in-law took in the orphans of Goldenbridge. They were starving and terrified...
I'm extremely relieved my mother-in-law, Marie, died when she did. In 1992, we had never heard of Christine Buckley or her brave outing of the horrific abuses at Goldenbridge.
We didn't know anything about the terrible tragedies taking place behind closed doors -- the hitting, walloping and buggering of small, defenceless children for their 'crimes' of bed-wetting, mitching or the circumstance of birth which rendered them bastards.
This was their fault, you see, and they had to be punished.
Marie, herself an orphaned and abandoned child but adopted by a kind family, wanted to 'give something back' in adulthood, and offered to foster such kids.
Evil
Goldenbridge was over-crowded with evil, bad children. The nuns didn't have the means or money to take care of them, what with the upkeep of the mahogony panelled walls and the best food to buy for the sisters.
The children were an inconvenience at best and despicable most of the time.
Laura used to come to Marie for weekends, Gerard for the long summer holidays -- spent idyllically in Greystones. Both would be collected starving, wan and frightened.
Marie thought they were nervous of her family. They were chronic bed-wetters -- but in Gerard's case only for the first week of the holiday. And the last, when he knew he was going back.
Laura would cry incessantly every Sunday. Gerard would rant and rail, holding on to Marie's legs as they tried to return him to the outwardly smiling and benevolent nuns, who would then beat him senseless when the doors were closed.
One summer, Gerard wasn't there when the family arrived. He had, said the nuns, stupidly fallen down the stairs.
He did this with alarming regularity. His black and blue body was testament to his stupidity. We've had to take him to hospital again, they said. The stupid boy.
For the first day, they would eat, and eat, and eat. Marie's children -- my husband and his siblings -- would be told to wait until the children had had their fill.
Nobody knew why they were so hungry. Greedy? No manners? Ungrateful?
They were sent back with new clothes -- well, hand-me-downs, cleaned and pressed. They were never seen in them again.
Gifts given to them were taken away once they returned to 'school', only to be taken out when the priest visited and paraded about with all the joy a worn teddybear or small doll can bring to a confused, frightened child.
If Marie thought the whole thing a bit odd, well, who was she to say anything? These were the pillars of society, priests and nuns whom one deferred to submissively. Indeed, they were the very two words used in describing the State's attitude to the abusers.
Endemic
"The Department of Education was deferential and submissive," said the inquiry in its document released after 10 long years of investigation.
Moreover, the abuse was 'systematic and endemic'. This, above all else, is the damning indictment.
It wasn't a rogue pervert. It was habitual, commonplace and cultural. There was an overall feeling that the children were somehow to blame for their own misfortune. They had bad parents, or no parents at all, or came from the massively large families that the same loving church denied parents control of.
Any 'punishment' was somehow justified, or at least a blind eye was turned. It wasn't just turned by the State, who is ultimately culpable. It was turned by the church authorities -- right to the top.
Indeed, if proof were needed of this, it was in the extent that such abusers were merely shunted from parish to parish to carry on their evil deeds.
It was never okay to batter and abuse children. It goes against human nature. Yet it was compounded by the resistance of the church to acknowledge it, and made worse again by the denial and obfuscation after overwhelming evidence came to light.
The disingenuous statements over the years ranged from: "We didn't," to "Well, we might have but we didn't know," to "We did know but we didn't realise it mattered," to "It wasn't our fault," and finally, "It was our fault, but there's not much we can do about it now."
Overwhelming
That any person is 'normal' after such an atrocious beginning, is overwhelming, and entirely to their credit. Their resilience is amazing.
They are the real heroes out of this and we should commend them for bringing this sorry tale into the open. Marie is turning in her grave.
- Sinead Ryan
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