Ireland still torturing abuse victims today

Ireland still torturing abuse victims today

I was appalled to read Mary McAleese's jingoistic rant in the Irish Times on 28 January. The appointed President's UCC speech plumbs new depths of hypocrisy and historical revisionism. She quotes the 1916 Proclamation and claims that independent Ireland fulfilled Pearse's promise to "cherish all the children of the nation equally". What planet is she on? Queen Mary of Ireland – for that's how she behaves – conveniently forgets that the theocratic police state (cynically called the "Free State") used its kangaroo courts to imprison tens of thousands of legally innocent children in hellhole prisons such as Artane, where they suffered inhuman and degrading treatment. The child prisoners were denied their most basic human and civil rights. Their cries for help were dismissed with contempt. The State wilfully set out to destroy those children, and in all too many cases it succeeded. I was one child of the nation "cherished" in that manner in 1961 – nearly 50 years after Pearse's fine words were delivered. And what was my crime? As the child of a "mixed marriage" I was, according to Holy Ireland, the product of a forbidden sexual union and I had to be punished for my inherited sin. A politico-religious kangaroo court decided that I needed to have "the love and fear of God" beaten into me. And so, without a trial or an inquiry of any kind, I was sentenced to nearly three years penal servitude in the notorious Artane gulag. I was abducted from my family to be enslaved and prostituted to Ireland's mullahs. I was a political prisoner of the Free State. I entered Artane at a peak of fitness. Two years later, I escaped from the prison, and from Ireland, a mental and physical wreck. But Holy Ireland hadn't finished with me yet. The Irish authorities pursued me with a determined vindictiveness that rational people find incomprehensible. While I was in sanctuary abroad, the Irish authorities issued a warrant for my arrest. I managed to evade my pursuers but I lived in constant fear, acutely conscious that I faced torture if recaptured. Ireland's "powerful and pitiless elite" stole my childhood innocence and my identity. I was falsely labelled a subhuman delinquent and that label remains around my neck to this day. Like thousands of others, I have spent decades in disaffection and forced exile, unable to return to my country because of a well-founded fear of persecution. I can never return until the illegal detention order issued against me in 1961 is rescinded and the warrant for my arrest is withdrawn. Mary McAleese has refused to rescind the illegal detention orders and has thus condemned me, and thousands like me, to permanent exile and discrimination. Meanwhile, the glorious Republic has cheerfully varied the court orders on duly convicted IRA terrorists. Clearly, there is one rule for the heroes of the Republic and another for those illegally imprisoned and abused as innocent children by the delinquent Irish State. Is that what Mary McAleese meant when she spoke of the Republic's "culture of inclusion"? The President predicted that her UCC speech would incite a row. How right she was! She's got one. JIM BERESFORD, Former Artane child prisoner 14262