The Carrigan Committee and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-century Ireland

The issue of child sexual abuse in Ireland has received a great deal of attention in the popular press in recent years, primarily in connection with the alleged physical and sexual abuse of children in industrial schools that were funded by the state and administered by both male and female religious orders.¹ However, there have been few quantitative or qualitative analyses of sexual offenses against children in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, nor of the extent of official awareness or discussion of the issue. Contemporary commentators often speak of child sexual abuse as if it has only recently been discovered, as if it either did not exist in earlier times or was so shrouded in secrecy as to be virtually invisible. Indeed, the phrase "child sexual abuse" gained currency in social and political parlance only in the mid-1980s; before then, sexual offenses perpetrated against children were not defined or treated differently from those perpetrated against adults. But the presumed silence surrounding child sexual abuse—even if the offense was not called that at the time—was not as complete as recent historians tend to assume. Further, when relative silence did prevail, this should not by itself be taken as evidence that lawmakers, courts, or even parents were ignorant of the fact that children were vulnerable to sexual assaults.

Irish social historians tend to take for granted that for much of the twentieth century the Catholic church was all-pervasive and all-powerful, particularly in the area of sexual morality, and that the state willingly bowed to pressure to legislate according to Catholic doctrine and principles. Historians point to a number of legislative initiatives, including the Mother and Child scheme of 1951, the Adoption Act of 1952, and earlier legislation regulating dance halls—as well as to social policy (or lack of it) related to unmarried mothers and their children—as proof of the church's moral authority in virtually all aspects of Irish social and political life.²

The recent scholarly examinations of the events surrounding the creation of the Carrigan Committee and its report on "sexual immorality" in the early 1930s tend to reinforce, rather than challenge, these assumptions about the place of the Catholic church in twentieth-century Ireland.³ James Smith argues that the government suppressed the Carrigan Report as part of its policy of "containing" sexual immorality after independence. Mark Finnane acknowledges the role of key Catholic prelates in formulating post-independence social policy, but he also emphasizes the role of other agencies and institutions, including An Garda Siochána and the courts, in shaping the post-independence "moral order." Finola Kennedy wonders whether suppression of the Carrigan Report in the early 1930s compounded Irish society's ignorance of the extent of sexual assaults against children. Despite differing approaches and conclusions, all of these articles are rooted in two assumptions: first, that Catholic sensibilities, more than anything else, guided official responses to sexual immorality generally, and to the Carrigan Report specifically; and second, that there was no public awareness of child sexual abuse in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Far from being ignorant of the vulnerability of children to sexual abuse in the first half of the twentieth century, lawmakers, jurists, and the public of the period were in general well aware of the problem, even if there was little public comment. The failure of the government to act on the Carrigan Committee's recommendations stemmed less from ignorance or disbelief of the conditions it depicted than from social and political priorities that officials believed were more pressing than their responsibility to protect vulnerable and victimized children. In the government's response to sexual assaults against children, the poor, disaffected, and marginalized were sacrificed to the "greater good"—which in this case meant male sexual license and protecting the newly independent state's legitimacy and reputation in the international arena. Finally, court cases from the 1920s to the 1950s reveal fundamental flaws and misconceptions about sexual assaults against children presented by the witnesses who appeared before the...