Clerical Child Abuse: The Scandal that Stormont chooses not to confront

If you didn’t notice the announcement of the three Clerical Child Abuse reports by the Northern Ireland Executive yesterday, that’s okay, because you weren’t meant to. There was no press conference. There was a terse text statement from the First and Deputy First Ministers which appeared online without notice at a few minutes after 2pm on 22 July. These reports have been in The Executive Office’s possession for over a year but have only been released at a point when both the Assembly and Westminster will be in recess for well over another month.

Victims and survivors of clerical child abuse in Northern Ireland have already endured a long wait for the Executive to take action. Nearly two decades have passed since calls were first made for an inquiry and other measures to secure accountability and prevent recurrence. During that time, as the recent safeguarding scandal which has engulfed the Presbyterian Church has painfully demonstrated, more children have been subjected to sexual, physical and emotional abuse within churches and other faith-based settings. Significant gaps in safeguarding requirements persist.

People have been asking about the status of these reports for months. In early March, when ministers had the documents for around eight months, came responses that indicated that they were not considered to be something for public consumption. Already, the idea that reports of a combined total of a few hundred pages had taken so long for ministers and officials to digest stretched credulity, but for Emma Little-Pengelly, there was no urgency (or even need) to publish; ‘they were commissioned not necessarily for publication but to inform the process’.

The material in the reports has no direct bearing on the criminal proceedings against Jeffrey Donaldson, but that trial and conviction looms over the reports being left to languish in a desk drawer. Donaldson, after all, fish pin affixed to his lapel, had always been so assiduous in courting “the Church Vote” throughout his career, and these reports pose profound questions for the entire spectrum of faith organisations. There is nothing in these reports which impacts directly on the Donaldson proceedings or which could have imperilled the trial and conviction; that is not a pretext for the delays with these releases. That trial, however, with its evidence of inadequate safeguarding within faith organisations in the 1990s, has highlighted problematic practices that these reports warn have not gone away.

This context is not evident in the statement issued by First Minister Michelle O’Neill and deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly. Having acknowledged the suffering of the victims and underlined the historical nature of the reports, Little-Pengelly goes out of her way to recognise how much things have changed, declaring that the ‘reports acknowledge the significant improvements in safeguarding arrangements within faith settings’, welcoming those improvements and doing no more than cautioning that ‘there is still much more that can be done’.

This statement provides a highly partial reflection of these documents, and particularly the report by Georgina Anderson and Orla Drummond into current practices. They draw attention to the fact that ‘some churches, especially small or rural ones, lack consistent record-keeping practices’ and to concerns over ‘the lack of records in existence and reluctance in sharing of records and information’ even in larger denominations. The sort of lax safeguarding practices that the Donaldson trial revealed in Armoy in the 1990s are being perpetuated across faith centres, Christian retreats and independent “micro churches”. These are serious and live issues, accompanied by a clear recommendation for ‘statutory agency in Northern Ireland … with the authority to oversee and audit safeguarding practices in faith-based organisations’. If there is indeed ‘much more that can be done’, there is little indication from ministers that they see this as a task on which they must lead.

When it comes to the two reports on historical abuses, these were always the poor relation of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, which examined allegations of child abuse in children’s homes and other residential institutions in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1995 (but which did not cover Church-run or denominational schools) or the Truth Recovery Independent Panel, which examined abuses associated with Mother and Baby Institutions, Magdalene Laundries, Workhouses, and related pathways and practices in Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1995. There has still been no overarching inquiry, as these new documents repeatedly acknowledge, that covers abuse in schools during this period.

In resource terms, the new reports were produced for a scant few thousand pounds. In terms of powers, they had nothing like the powers of a full statutory inquiry to compel evidence release and hear testimony. But that’s the point, the historical components of these reports amount to preliminary ground work. Read them all closely and you see that certain sections appear marked “draft”. The authors clearly expected a level of engagement and final approval that they never received. The oral history report was an effort to secure some testimony from witnesses, many of whom are now old, and much as it makes for harrowing reading, it makes no claim to be comprehensive. The documentary evidence report, with no power to compel information releases, was at best a scoping exercise. Together they provide the basis for the statutory inquiry (like the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry) which can perform these functions. That is, indeed, their key recommendation.

There is nothing, however, in the ministerial statement on the publication of the reports about their recommendations. The limited resources available for these reports, the delays in releasing them, the manner of their eventual release, would lead all but the most trusting of observers inexorably to the conclusion that, for the Executive’s leadership, these were not scoping papers at all. They look much more like a means to put off doing anything of substance to tackle historical abuses or ensure safeguarding standards. It should be a burning scandal to see victims and survivors brushed off in this way, but apparently this week has an annually reserved media slot for culture war fulminations about Féile.

The First and deputy First Ministers could have spoken with one voice, on the basis of both these reports and the Truth Recovery Independent Panel report published earlier this month, and requested that the new Secretary of State lay legislation for the recommended public inquiries before Westminster. They did not. Even in the wake of the Donaldson trial, perhaps especially in the wake of that trial, these remain issues that ministers struggle to confront, and would like the public to ignore.

Colin Murray is a Professor of Law and Democracy at Newcastle Law School