Book: The Pope, Catholic Church need to account for sex victims

Kathy O'Beirne Dont Ever Tell In the Name of God.

TITLE: Dont Ever Tell

AUTHOR: Kathy O'Beirne

PUBLISHER: Mainstream Publishing, 2005

PAGES: 304

GENRE: Biography

REVIEWER: Manuel Odeny

The book is dedicated to those, male and female, who suffered in the orphanages, industrial schools, mental institutions and Magdalene laundries run by the Catholic church of Ireland and the government. It is also dedicated to all those who have ever suffered abuse in their lives.

The story, true, revolves around a devastating account of a stolen childhood by neglect and fear.

Kathy O'Beirne was the first daughter and child to a warm-dedicated small mother and a brutal father who to the outside world was a Christian and a smartly dressed gentleman. That is until the door was closed. He could turn brutal and mean by beating the devil out of her 'dirty' daughter. At only four years of age with anger and sadness the young girl started to be raped by two neighborhood boys. A trend which was to continue.

Kathy; confused, frightened and isolated is taken by her father too a government and Catholic Church runned institutions to make a life out of her. Believing that God will cleanse her of dirt. and that was the first encounter at the school from hell.


Demeaning nuns constantly told the girls how worthless they are, constantly beating and slaving them. The grueling life begins. The children from 8-14 years are locked up in a fortress where they work to atone their sins. at 12 years Kathy is given a gruesome work of washing dead bodies at a morgue.

With no one to turn to, the priests and friars preaching to the 'penitents' start raping the girls. Consequently with barely a month to her fourteenth birthday Kathy gives birth. Heavily traumatized by rape the young Kathy recollects:

"The nuns told me I was expecting the child of the Devil.....i was horrified by the idea(breast feeding) .....as it seemed disgusting... I associated people touching me there with being abused."

The baby was later bottle fed. That was not all. Kathy could not change the soiled child.

"I felt there was something wrong with taking off her nappy and cleaning her down there, as when i had been touched there something dirty and awful had happened to me."


From children wards, girls reporting the rapes by priests were taken to psychiatry wards where they were used as guinea pigs in amoral system and later to Magdalene laundries where each morning truck loads full of dirty linen from factories, hospitals, schools and prisons were cleaned by the girls.

In the church run institutions children, especially young girls were treated like slaves, sex objects and specimen while all profit went to the church.

Aodhan Madden a chief investigative journalist of Irish Crime, Dublin writing the forward of the book on February 2005 notes;


“Many of the girls in these church-run institutions were raped and if they fell pregnant, their babies were then sold off to wealthy couples in America. A taxi driver remembers driving some of these babies to the North. The church ran a lucrative baby industry for profit ignoring the human misery caused to deprived mothers."

So sinned against were the girls and babies that when dead they were dumped and buried with black cross (symbolizing Devil's soul) in mass graves. Madden notes:

"There is one badly neglected site in the Glasnevin cemetery."
 

The Author

For over a decade Kathy O'Beirne is fighting for the rape victims. There is no more secrets, the secrets are out, free at last. But the 'Holy' Catholic church of Ireland and the government are still adamant about their involvement.

Dont Ever Tell is the type of a book that you stumble upon in a library with minimum chance of ever coming across it again, but the impact it etches in your life is permanent. That reminds me of Barbara Kimenye's Pretty Boy, Beware about child prostitution in the Kenya's Coast Province.

For more information on Magdalene girls check the following websites:

http://www.paddycloyle.com/
www.netreach.net/-steed/magdalene.html
www.tethys.croydon.ac.uk/magdalenecircle.net
http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/