‘Clear visualisations’

“With clear visualisations we show, for the first time, the active networks behind the industrial schools,” Pine says. “This gives us a picture of how abusers were transferred between schools. We can also see how people within the system communicated, including parents, the religious staff, and the Department of Education. These visualisations nail the lie that people – and the Government – did not know what was happening in these institutions.

“The close textual analysis also gave us new insights into the experience of abuse as co-ordinating the material uncovered another type of mistreatment which took the form of a dreaded anticipation of “waiting” to be beaten or assaulted,” Pine says. 

“We were also interested in getting to the heart of who knew about the abuse because one of the big issues for survivors is this general misapprehension that people outside these institutions didn’t know it was going on. 

To investigate this comprehensively we built a social network that logged every moment of communication between the key actors – residence managers, the Department of Education, parish priests, parents, local TDs and so on. 

It became very clear that people did know and the biggest node on the network was the Department of Education. I feel this was underrepresented when the Ryan report was publicly launched. The focus has been overwhelmingly on the religious orders when the responsibility is actually more widespread than that.”