In May this year, a Commission under Justice Sean Ryan reported to the Irish Government on the wide-scale abuse of children in Irish institutions over a very long period. This shocking report detailed the appalling violence and abuse against children, largely carried out in residential schools, reformatories and orphanages run by the Catholic Church and to which they had been committed by the State.

Rev. Kevin Annett, who almost singlehandedly forced the Canadian Government and the Vatican to issue apologies for their violence against children in native boarding schools in Canada, will be speaking in Ireland in late October and early November as part of a European lecture tour.

Annett will be screening his documentary film Unrepentant and speaking on both sides of the border, where he hopes to meet survivors of abuse by the Church in Ireland. He sees strong similarities between crimes against children, and their cover-up, in both Ireland and Canada.

“In both countries, the violence, terrorizing and even murder of innocent children at the hands of the church was aided and abetted, and then actively concealed, by reigning governments”

“Since then, the church has successfully evaded prosecution and even imposed a “no naming” censorship on the official inquiry into their crimes. There can be no justice for survivors and their families until a real investigation, with the power to prosecute and jail the guilty, has come into being.”

Annett’s was a “voice in the wilderness” when he commenced a public campaign to expose crimes in Canadian Indian boarding schools in 1995. During the past year, he was partly vindicated when the Canadian Government, followed by the Vatican, issued limited “apologies” for injuries done to children in these schools.