Sex Crime Ireland

Sexual Crime in Ireland




Sexual crimes cover a wide range of behaviour and events. These crimes are compounded by the intense emotions involved in sexual behaviour, the distortion that can be caused to an individual’s sexual identity by sexual crimes being perpetrated upon them, by the dominant sexual culture and by moral and religious dimensions (O’Mahony.1996). Particularly in the past two decades with the advent of the proliferation of media and in particular new technologies, we are more acutely aware of the many cases of sexual crime coming before the Courts and perhaps in greater number, persons claiming to have been raped and sexually abused when they were children being held in institutions of ‘care’ that were run by the Catholic Church and under the ‘supervision’ of the Irish State, have alerted us to the cruel hurt and pain that can be inflicted on such persons. West (1983) suggests that most children outgrow the negative effects of such abuse, however, those victims giving testimony to the Redress Board that was established to give financial compensation to those victims of Religious child rapists would contradict this contention.



Sexual crime in the Irish Republic is not something that has simply appeared from nowhere in the 21st Century, indeed, from the very foundation of the Irish Free State sexual crime and in particular against children was common place. Such was the scale of sexual crime against children that the Irish Government of 1930 was pushed to establish an inquiry to examine the extent of sexual crime in the newly liberated territory. The Carrigan Report [1] was chaired by Mr William Carrigan a retired Senior Council, the evidence presented to Carrigan left the committee in no doubt that child sexual abuse was systematic and wide spread. Carrigan concluded that:



There was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of cases of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children less than 10 years.



This observation was supported by the Police Commissioner of the Day, Eoin Duffy, who said that less than 25% of cases were being reported and then less than 15% of these cases were being prosecuted due to a host of reasons. Duffy said that from his own knowledge the number of children under 13 years of age being sexually abused was “Alarming”. It is worth noting at this point that in 2010 little has changed, at Ballyshannon Circuit Court, in County Donegal on the 18th of June 2010, a Garda told the court that a now twenty-year-old women had been raped 57 times by 22 adult men when she was 13 years old, some of those men have been successfully prosecuted. It is clear from Carrigan and other sources that many police officers wanted to do what they could to prevent sexual crime and bring those responsible to justice; however, they faced many hurdles in their task including the power of the Catholic Church in communities all over Ireland. The findings of the Carrigan Report would not at that time be made public due to pressure from the Catholic Hierarchy and the acquiescent Government of the day. While De Valera made speeches about the, “Laughter of happy maidens”, children were being raped to such an extent in his own constituency that a Judge described the Assizes in De Valera’s own constituency as the “Dirty Assizes” due to the large number of child sex crimes appearing before it.



Francis Hackett who settled in Ireland in the 1920s and was a juror from 1929-37 described sitting through court proceedings that dealt in one sitting with, 20 counts of buggery, a girl who threw her new born baby from a moving train, an elderly man who sexually abused two young girls, and a young man who raped a girl who was under the age of sixteen. However, all of this information was to be confined within its own parochial parameters, the Carrigan Report would not be published as the Catholic Church did not want the inevitable bad publicity that would follow. The Catholic Church had never signed up to the democratic program and felt that they had a God sent right to do as they pleased. The Carrigan suppression is a clear indication as to how the relationship between the Catholic Church and the State worked.



However, we now know that the Catholic Church had much more to hide than the base immorality of Ireland’s newly liberated streets. Within the new order of the Irish Free State the Catholic Church had taken control of the Education system and the much hated ‘Industrial Schools’ and the Government remained as silent partners. We now know from the Ferns, Murphy and Ryan Reports into child sex abuse that the Catholic Church not only allowed but facilitated those Homophiles, Hetrophiles and Paedophiles within its ranks that raped and tortured the children in their ‘care’. This was not passive facilitation but was facilitation of a most criminal nature. Known child rapists were protected while the victims were silenced, known child rapists were sent all over the world where their crimes were unknown and they simply continued to rape children. Cardinal Sean Brady, in Ireland, has admitted in 2010 that he with other members of the Catholic Church, forced child victims of religious child rape to sign letters of secrecy about their ordeals.



The Limits of Liberty, presented by RTE 1, on the 31st of May 2010, tells the heart rendering story of Peter Tyrrell, who was formerly housed in Letterfrack Industrial School, 1924-32, for no other reason than that his family was poor. Peter had committed no crime; his only crime was to come from a family that was poor. Peter had in later life written many letters of complaint to the authorities complaining about the abuse of children by the Religious Orders but his calls for justice fell on deaf ears. Peter felt that he was not believed and in 1967 feeling betrayed and isolated, Peter dosed himself with petrol on Hampstead Heath in England and took his own life. It took twelve months for his body to be identified. We now know that Peter was telling the truth, that truth has been established by a 1000 voices that echoed for so long in those places of evil. The rape and torture of children at the hands of Catholic Priests, Christian Brothers and a host of other Devils in Skirts was systematic and deliberate, these Devils were not held to account by their political bedfellows. Peter Tyrrell had fought against the Nazis in WW11 and had been a prisoner of war; he said in one of his letters that the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church was much greater than anything he had been subjected to by the German Guards or Gestapo at his prisoner of war camp.



The area of sexual crime that has evoked most public disquiet, is that perpetrated against children, yet the Irish Republic in 2010 has no mandatory reporting of child rape or abuse. Much of the sexual crime committed against children, although not exclusively, involves seduction and entrapment. Contrary to public discourse, those persons in our community who commit acts of sexual crime against children are not a homogeneous group, this category of offender normally and conveniently referred to as paedophiles (sexual attraction to children) is made up of Homophiles (same gender sex abuse), Hetrophiles (opposite gender sex abuse), Bi-sexual paedophiles (either gender, sex abuse), Homosexual epebopiles (sexual abuse of same gender adolescents) and so forth (Casey.1999). There are two reasons that I make this point, First: so that from the very out set of this article, it is clear, that those who commit sexual crimes against children cannot be set outside mainstream society as an easily identifiable group. It may well suit the liberal agenda to castigate this group of people as being non-homosexual, non-lesbian or non-decent middle class liberal, just as it may suit the right wing hard line agenda, to suggest that this is a small deviant group outside of the conservative elite of politicians, Churchmen, Judges, Barristers, Police officers, Army officers, Solicitors, Business Executives and so forth, however, they are all that and more (Operation Amethyst, The Irish Times.2002, Phoenix.2002, Operation Magenta, Ferns, Murphy and Ryan Reports, Irishtimes.com). Secondly and neatly summed up by Brenda O’Brien:

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