Irish Americans shocked, outraged at Irish child abuse report

'The collar shouldn't save them from prosecution'

Irish Americans have reacted with outrage and disgust to the Ryan Commission report on clerical abuse of children in Ireland.

The 2,600-page report concluded nine years of investigations into the claims by thousands of adults that they were abused for decades at reform schools and that the Irish government failed to do anything to stop it.

Over 30,000 Irish children, now between 50 and 80 years of age, were sent to industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories because they were deemed “dysfunctional.”

Johnny Rush, from County Roscommon native, said the findings were “just disgusting.”

Rush, 72, who attended Mass at St Barnabas church Sunday in the heavily Irish neighborhood of Woodlawn in New York said: “We knew it was going on for years, this sort of thing, but no one said a thing.

"I myself saw a lot of things that I will never repeat in the Christian Brothers School that I went to as a young lad, and it’s just a shame that it took all these years for it to come out in the open.”

Blind eye

Rush, who said he is still a devout Catholic and will be until the day he dies, added that what angered him the most is that parents, other teachers and adults turned a blind eye to what went on.

 “Kids would tell their parents, but sure what would happen then - they would get the beating at home for disrespecting their elders,” said Rush.

“Back then that was how it was, you kept your mouth shut and it was supposed to all go away. Well, that report in Ireland proves that it never went away.”

Rush tucked his rosary beads away as he left the steps of the church and blessed himself, a blessing he was giving up for the victims.

Fiona Brennan, who spent the first 10 years of her life in County Sligo before moving to County Derry with her family, said she wasn’t surprised. 

“The church has continuously moved priests around from parish to parish knowing that they had been accused of horrendous crimes,” she  said angrily. “Nothing will ever change unless prosecutions come from this.”

Church 'no longer respectable'

Brennan, a niece of John Hume -- leader of the Catholic civil rights movement in Northern Ireland for over 40 years and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize -- remembers when she was growing up that it was forbidden to speak ill of a priest or say anything that would damage the reputation of the Catholic Church.

​
Nster.com