The children who lived through Nazareth Lodge, Kircubbin, Derry’s Nazareth House - and other ‘homes’ that abused many over decades - finally got a formal apology last week.
Sitting in Stormont, about 80 heard politicians say this is our shame, not yours, the state failed you, we are sorry you were not believed, we are sorry.’
The wait was too long. Some walked out. Some died waiting, like Judge Anthony Hart who listened through three years while the survivors who could bear to relived awful experience. Judge Hart five years ago said they must have an apology from the state, a memorial to the injustice and cruelty of their suffering, ‘redress by the institution and/or the Executive to meet the particular needs of victims.’ He said it all again when he was dying, anger coming through a lifetime’s discipline at the way a dysfunctional Stormont held up those formal words, and the first steps towards compensation.
The institutions responsible for the homes where abuse happened have not yet paid out.
In 2014 Kate Walmsley was the first witness to waive her right to anonymity, when she told the Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry how a nun in Derry’s Nazareth Home helped one of the two priests who abused her. She was eight when it started. ‘I was constantly told I was bad’, she said later, urging every survivor who could bear it to go public. ‘But I know now that people can like me.’ And that none of it was her fault.
Jimmy Stewart was eight too when a nun met him and his younger brother at the door of Belfast’s Nazareth Lodge in Belfast and called them ‘wee mongrels’. He realised later this was because one parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. His mother had died at 32, his father was deaf and couldn’t speak. ‘He tried to look after us, he couldn't.’ What he most remembers is ‘the beatings. The coldness. You never saw a smile.’
Hard-working and compassionate reporters gave survivors like Kate Walmsley and Jimmy Stewart space and time to voice these memories. What’s the most cruel thing you can do to a child? To go by what survivors of abuse say making a child feel unloved and unlovable is also abuse. When a child says this is what someone is doing to me, to blame them is abuse piled on abuse.
The DUP’s Michelle McIlveen said there was neither excuse nor defence for what happened: ‘We are sorry that the state did not protect you.’ The SDLP’s Nichola Mallon said the ‘guilt and shame of what happened to you belonged to those who should have protected you’. But the state was never going to protect the poorest of the poor, who made up most of those in institutional care.
The most broken families fell through the net of neighbourly kindness. The powerful institutions of Church and state looked away. For decades more Catholics than Protestants were deathly poor.
Of the six representatives of institutions who spoke in Stormont four represented Catholic orders, one each for Barnardo’s and a Church of Ireland organisation. More Catholic representatives; the majority of abuse reported was in homes run by nuns and brothers.
After the Stormont speeches Archbishop Eamon Martin, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland apologised ‘to all those who suffered from their horrific experience in Church-run institutions, and to their loved ones.’ Many in the Church had been ‘blinded’ to the ‘shocking neglect, sins and crime being perpetrated in their midst’, he said.‘Shame on us’.
That was a fine statement. Blind eyes indeed enabled the most rampant ordained abusers. Will the institutional Church now take responsibility for those crimes ‘in their midst’ or continue using lawyers to minimise what they pay? This institution is practised at diffusing responsibility; orders with their own superiors, each bishop only ‘primus inter pares’.
But this archbishop surely cannot bear to make another shamed apology. After more waiting.
