Secrets and Lies: The sexual abuse of children in Irish institutions 1922-1971

This paper explores the linkages between communication policy in Ireland and the wider social, political and economic factors relating to the development of social policy in regard to the nation’s most vulnerable children, namely, its marginalized children in institutional care. It will be demonstrated that the complex interactions between Church and State in the immediate post-colonial era, encouraged the obfuscation and avoidance of the realities of life in Ireland’s reformatory and industrial schools by laying a foundation of subterfuge and denial that endured for much of the 20th century. Central to this strategy was the systemic suppression of communication that could cause public embarrassment for both Church and State by undermining the Free State’s founding myth. Namely, that the new State, guided by the Church, was a Catholic nation free, in the main, from the vices or secular atheistic materialism of the outside world. It will be demonstrated that his myth was fundamentally incompatible with the realities of the lives led by many of the State’s cared-for children.