In essence, Caranua, a State body set up to help survivors to access funds given very reluctantly by the religious, is supposed to be part of the ‘good’
team. That would ordinarily be hard to believe considering what the survivor’s
of Ireland’s gulags have already gone through long after they visited hell on
this earth. Many survivors now are in their middle or late middle age years,
while others are in the seventh decade of their lives and older. Set in their
ways does not even begin to describe how they feel and the permanent feelings
of betrayal that casts a long shadow wherever they go. It is, I say
tentatively, whatever way you want to look at it, a beginning of closure at
it’s best, and that someone is still at least listening and doing something
about to help survivors. Caranua, I believe so far as possible to say without
fully knowing, is a force for possibly something better.
Mary Higgins
I can imagine, not too wildly, someone from Caranua fielding
phone calls from a lot of survivors. Survivors broadly, as children, were in
the main malnourished, poorly educated, without love, and abused in the main
three strands that define it: physical, sexual and emotional. Any or all of
these things happening to any child results in adulthood, a condition of an
inflexible kind and a flawed cognitive development of the mind starting with a big
‘them and us’ attitude in the many personal matters that make up their lives. Those phone
calls would make eavesdropping on them a blood sport. Like a teacher needing to
know how to teach, for Caranua it is a deep learning curve in how to deal with
that.
The chief executive head of Caranua is Mary Higgins. She
appears as a no nonsense kind of person so far, translating visually and orally
that she will do exactly what she needs to do for survivors. Her perspective on
them appears wide, and needs to be; she is not about taking ‘double speak’ as a
language either.
Commenting on the Christian Brothers unfulfilled promises of
contributions to the Caranua fund, Mary said this: “The more money we have the more it could spend on helping survivors. I think it would be a
concern if the promise wasn’t met.” The Christian Brothers of course have been
busy for well over a decade moving their liquid assets (over €i billion so
far and rising) and their vast property empires into very hard to get at ‘trust
funds’ in order to cheat survivors of their moral and just compensation. These actions extended to the many other orders of religious groups of nuns and priests as well (one order of nuns alone are the 5th biggest landowners in Ireland) The vows
of poverty was missed here !!
But these ‘trust funds’ have not been put together by God
and can be pulled asunder by man, and trust has nothing to do with it. Of
course these issues of morality and justice never bothered the religious before
and it would be rather optimistic to assume that it would bother them now. Only
the bedrock of solid law demanding recompense and accountability can and will do
that. The Christian Brothers gave what they were forced to give to their
victims and not one penny more, and only apologized for their crimes when they
no longer could deny the undeniable; this was also the world view of the other God squads. Mary is turning on their partners in crime too: the Irish Government,
and in particular the issuance of enhanced medical cards.
These enhanced medical cards have been issued to people who
were the victims of the Hepatitis C blood contaminate products, and available
for the Magdalene Laundry victims of the nuns, and yet not one card for the
15,000 victims of the Industrial and reformatory institutions run by the
religious in Ireland.
Mary Higgins saw it this way: “Given that everybody else who
falls into the survivor category is getting some form of enhanced healthcare,
we feel that ‘our people’ should get that too.” That wording: ‘our people’ lets
me believe that Mary is different and want to make a difference too. She went
on: “Over half of abuse survivors are aged 60 or over, and their health is
worse than their chronological age. They had a bad start in life, they had poor
nutrition, they were cold a lot of the time, they had ill fitting shoes, a lot
of them worked from a very young age on farms and they suffered abuse and
neglect as well.”
At the minutes of Caranua’s board meeting this year they
noted: “The Department of Health is not encouraging about survivors getting an
enhanced medical card.” Even the replicating of services regarding education
and more is an issue here, because many of these are freely available if you
are un-employed or impoverished, yet Caranua is footing the bill for them
leaving less monies for survivors for other and more vital matters starting
with health.
Caranua is there for survivors and Mary Higgins is a strong
voice for them and maybe for us. They must be given a chance to be heard, to observe,
and to protect their remit and resources so that more will be available for
survivors and their urgent needs in the autumn of their years. Only then can we
even begin to judge them.
The government historically and presently have been culpable
in the crimes and cover ups of the religious, and they too must be part of the
solution and not the problem. If that proves to be the case, then the religious
will have no choice but to do the right thing whether they want to or not.
Is Caranua a force for good or bad? We will have to wait and see.
Barry Clifford
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