A well-organised paedophile ring involving civil servants, ex-clergy, members of political parties and even gardai infiltrated the child-care system in Ireland.
Now
campaigners believe that there were links between the Dublin-based ring
and members of a well-organised paedophile ring which infiltrated the
child-care system in north Wales, and which was finally exposed and
broken up in the mid-1990s.
While
the Catholic Church has been vilified in the Ryan Report there are now
calls for an inquiry into the role of non-clerical abusers in state-run
institutions
The
Government has been taking a more severe legal attitude to victims of
abuse in State-run schools and other institutions than the Catholic
Church has to victims of clerical abuse, they say. The Department of
Education has "taken on" one such victim, Louise O'Keeffe, who was raped
by the headmaster of her school in west Cork when she was eight years
old in 1973. Although former primary school headmaster Leo Hickey was
convicted of multiple rape and abuse of children, Ms O'Keeffe was left
with a legal bill of €500,000 after the State successfully fought her
claim for compensation.
Hundreds
of victims of rape and abuse by non-clerical teachers or care workers
in the State's employ have received letters from the Dept of Education
threatening that their cases will be fought.
Ms
O'Keeffe, the High Court heard, suffered "catastrophic injuries" at the
hands of the paedophile rapist Hickey -- who nevertheless continues to
be paid his State pension of €26,000 a year.
Among
the figures identified but never exposed because of insufficient
evidence is a retired senior civil servant who would have the power to
suppress indictments and reports on sex offenders.
Another
is a retired former senior garda in Dublin who had well-known links to
senior clergy and who was accused of raping a 13-year-old boy. The garda
was transferred from a city station after the allegation but was never
questioned or charged.
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And
at least one senior care worker remained in public employ until the
mid-1990s, despite repeated claims by boys that he was an abuser and
brought paedophiles from Britain and Northern Ireland to care homes to
abuse boys.
Many
boys who passed through the state-run homes later became teenage
prostitutes. Several have made allegations about a ring of apparently
rich and well-connected paedophiles with access to the homes in the
1980s.
In
an ironic twist, an Irish woman who has been raising the issue of abuse
of children in State-run institutions in Dublin, Loretta Byrne, was
effectively forced from her job in the Department of Education in 1988
after she persisted in seeking action about allegations of abuse of boys
in care.
Among
the boys who claimed to have been raped in the late 1980s was Brendan
O'Donnell, who went on to murder Imelda Riney, her three-year-old son
Liam, and Fr Joe Walsh in 1994.
One
home where Loretta Byrne says there was strong evidence of abuse was
Trudder House in Wicklow, which was opened and run directly by the State
in the 1970s specifically for Traveller children.
One
of the first directors of Trudder House in Newtownmountkennedy was
Duncan McInnes from Scotland, who raped and abused dozens of children in
the home. He fled the country after complaints were made in 1981. He
later died in Canada.
Paedophile
David Murray was forced to leave the Sisters of Charity in Kilkenny in
the mid-1970s after a boy said Murray had raped him. Rather than report
this to the gardai, the Sisters helped Murray find a new job at Scoil
Ard Mhuire at Oberstown, Co Dublin, where he worked for several years.
Murray is believed to have had links with Welsh paedophiles who
travelled between here and north Wales and even found jobs for some in
State care homes here. He was eventually convicted of buggery and gross
indecency and sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment in 1997.
By
the time he was arrested and questioned in the mid-1990s, Murray had
raped and abused boys in a succession of homes here and, it is believed,
Wales and possibly Northern Ireland. Details of all this were excluded
from the report which concentrated almost exclusively on the abuses in
Church-run institutions.
Ms
Byrne said: "The Government has been aware of the abuse that went on in
state institutions for a very long time. [Judge] Mary Laffoy resigned
because the Department of Education would not give her papers. They must
release these papers if the victims in these places are to get the kind
of closure that the clerical abuse victims have had in the redress
process."
Paedophile ring 'abused children in State homes'
from 2009.
