Ireland Delivers Landmark Report on Catholic Child Abuse

A nine-year investigation into Ireland's Catholic-run children's institutions has found priests and nuns terrorised thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rape and humiliation.

The high court judge Sean Ryan today unveiled the 2,600-page final report of Ireland's commission into child abuse, which drew on testimony from thousands of former students and officials from more than 250 church-run institutions.

More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families – a category that unmarried mothers were often lumped into – were sent to Ireland's austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.

The report found that molestation and rape were "endemic" in boys' facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but instead endured frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

"In some schools a high level of ritualised beating was routine. ... Girls were struck with implements designed to maximise pain and were struck on all parts of the body," the report said. "Personal and family denigration was widespread."

The Catholic church had been steeling itself for the report, which was

repeatedly delayed by church lawsuits, missing documentation and alleged government obstruction.

The church had already been under fire over the sexual misbehaviour of several priests in various Irish parishes.

The commission's experts have sought to produce a comprehensive portrait of sexual, physical and emotional damage inflicted on the child victims. The thousands of survivors said they had no safe way to tell their stories until the investigation began because much of Irish Catholic society sought to label them as liars.

Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (Isoca), an organisation set up to help victims, today said it was now up to the Vatican to investigate its religious orders in the republic.

John Kelly, the Isoca coordinator in Dublin, said: "Now that the Ryan [Laffoy] commission is finished, we call upon ... Pope Benedict XVI to convene a special consistory court to fully investigate the activities of the Catholic religious orders in Ireland.

"Amongst other things, such a court could establish the whereabouts of Irish state assets that were misappropriated over many years by the religious orders and make restitution to the Irish state exchequer."

During the commission's investigations, oral evidence was collected from more than 1,000 people, mainly aged from their 50s to 70s.

Several hundred travelled back to Ireland from the US and Australia to describe their childhood of terror and intimidation.

The Christian Brothers delayed the investigation for more than a year with a lawsuit that successfully defended their members' right to anonymity in all references in the report, even in cases in which individual Christian Brothers had already been convicted of sexual and physical attacks on children.

The commission's original judge, Mary Laffoy, resigned from her post in 2003 over claims that the Irish department of education – which was in charge of inspecting the orphanages and industrial schools – was refusing to hand over documents to her.