Letters

Religious institutions’ records

Church and State

Tue Jun 13 2023 - 02:30

Sir, – Fintan O’Toole demands that the records of all church-run institutions such as St Joseph’s industrial school in Glinn be nationalised (“All church-run institutions’ records should be nationalised”, Weekend Review, June 10th).

However, Mr O’ Toole himself correctly states that “It was the State’s courts that committed children to these hellholes. It was the State that paid the salaries of the brothers who worked in them. It was the State that failed in its legal duty to supervise and regulate these institutions.”

So, to be consistent with Mr O’Toole’s own statement that the records of systematic human rights abuses should not be controlled by the institutions that inflicted those abuses, why should the State be allowed to take ownership of such records?

Mr O’Toole notes how records of correspondence with the Department of Education about the school in question were “expunged from the department’s files”.

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Surely it is a non-sequitur that control of the records in question be entrusted to such a State?

I suggest that there are better solutions such as the establishment of an independent trust (with grant or aid from the State and/or religious orders if necessary) to safeguard the records in question. – Is mise,

SEÁN A RYAN,

Howth Road,

Dublin 5.

Sir, – How cruel is it that Tom Wall, who suffered so terribly at the hands of the Christian Brothers of Glinn, is being pursued through the courts in an attempt to prevent evidence of cruelty and abuse emerging?

Such records cannot remain the inviolable property of the brothers who have already shown themselves to be less than co-operative with the law in abuse cases in very recent times.

We are admiring of Tom Wall but he should also be respected and supported by Government, rather than being abandoned to fight this case alone.

He is doing all of us more than a little service. – Yours, etc,

MARION WALSH,

Dublin 4.

Sir, – Reading Fintan O’Toole’s piece in Saturday’s paper, the warped, symbiotic relationship between Church and State was captured in all its relentless horror through the experiences of Tom Wall’s tortured life.

Would it not be a fitting display of solidarity with victims of such barbarity, to finally have done with the modern remaining example of Church/State collaboration, by removing the twice daily reminder of the Angelus from the airwaves of our national broadcaster. – Yours, etc,

JOSEPH CRAWLEY,

Stoneybatter,

Dublin 7.