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

Abstract

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, particular