Irish School Victims Angry That Abusers Not Named

Irish school victims angry that abusers not named
By Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press | Yahoo! News

The thousands of victims of Ireland's child-abuse homes spent decades just trying to get the public to believe them. A mammoth investigation has proved the horrors of their youth, but left many disappointed that their abusers were not named.

A nine-year probe into child abuse by Ireland's Catholic religious orders painted a damning portrait of a system that shielded child-molesters from justice and trapped generations of Ireland's poorest children to misery from the 1930s to the 1990s.

"I do genuinely believe that it would have been a further step towards our healing if our abusers had been named and shamed," said Christine Buckley, 62, who spent her first 18 years in a Dublin orphanage run by Sisters of Mercy nuns.

More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families — a category that included unmarried mothers — were sent to the mostly residential schools where the abuse took place.

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