The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Friday, March 10, 2017

interview with a social worker


JH: You say that the worst experience...

SW: The worst experience was in that housing estate in Rathangan.

JH: How bad was it.

SW: It was bad.

JH: As bad as in my town?

SW: James you haven't got a clue.

JH: Really?

SW: You've no idea. 

JH: Kilcullen is pretty bad. We've had a drugs gang here for decades. An IRA gang for decades. The Hutch gang has moved in. We had a corrupt cop running the town for gangland. We have gang bangers buying commercial property. There's drugs dealt freely in all the schools. Kilcullen is like the Moyross of the east. They're moving in and taking over. I've found evidence of harassment activities being carried out extensively across the community. Sometimes they target people just for kicks. In one case an international boxer was harassing a widow for ten years after her husband died. He wasn't that good a boxer you understand. He  used to lose all the time when up against other boxers. But he was tougher than the average widow. How bad is that?

SW: What I experienced was off the scale.

JH: Well what are we talking about? What were you seeing that was upsetting you?

SW: Children in danger.

JH: What sort of danger?

SW: It was so bad eventually I had to ask to be transferred. I couldn't take on board what I was seeing.

JH: Which was?

SW: The children were not safe.

JH: Tell me what you mean by that. What was happening to them exactly?

SW: It was... it was... The children being used. Pornography. Strangers coming to the house.

JH: Are you saying people were prostituting their children to strangers?

SW: Yes.

JH: Routinely?

SW: Yes.

JH: Allowing visitors to their homes to pleasure themselves on their chlldren?

SW: Yes.

JH: And is that not something we could agree on as a society to simply put a stop to? That the moment we see something like that, that we take the children into care. That the kids get twenty years to grow up. And that the family members who prostituted them never have access to them again in their childhood.

SW: James it's not that simple.

JH: But couldn't we agree to make it that simple? That never again will we ask the children to go back to such a situation?

SW: It's not all black and white. There is always a great reluctance to split up families.

JH: So what is the answer?

SW: Education for a start.

JH: What does that mean?

SW: It means allocating resources to those families.

JH: Have you ever had a success in one of those situations? I mean something that you could call an improvement in the situation?

SW: Yes. A few.

JH: What are you calling a success?

SW: Okay. In once case we got remedial help for the mother. We taught her to read.

JH: And meanwhile the children she had terrorised and prostituted were going home every night to be terrorised and prostituted again? They were going back into that house with no hope of rescue.

SW: Often the children don't want to be taken away from their families.

JH: Do you really believe that?

SW: It's a fact.

JH: In your work would you ever be left alone with the children?

SW: No. A family member would always be present.

JH: Right. So the kids could never really speak freely to you. If they wanted to escape from the daily violations and rape, they couldn't really say it. Do you yourself not think the power for decisive action should exist? That the moment we know that abuse of an extreme nature is taking place, the capacity should be there to decisively rescue the children? Not just hand them over to their grandmothers or someone else in the family. But to take them out of that milieu completely and give them a chance of a life.

SW: There aren't the resources for that. You don't realise the numbers. Where would we send them?

JH: Could we not create a list of 20,000 decent people, tough people, not idiots, who aren't afraid of anything and have shown their toughness in life. People that we can agree are good, worthy, capable and willing people. The sort of people who want to give something back to Ireland and are willing to take a kid into their home but who would also be capable of giving that child firm guidance and example. Find an army officer who's been proven in battle. A tough cop. Even the most troubled teenager would appreciate firm guidance eventually. I mean appreciate it over being serially violated or over the suicidal lack of authority in government care facilities. Tough, decent righteous. Those sort of people. Make a list of them. And the moment you establish a parent is prostituting her own child, that parent never sees that child again. Could we not agree at least, that something like this should be done? 

SW: It's not as black and white as you think.

JH: What do you think were the causes of the situations you encountered?

SW: There are two causes. Tradition and ignorance.

JH: Really?

SW: In some cases the behaviour has continued for generations.

JH: How would you establish that?

SW: Well James it's in the Bible.

JH: I'm asking you to restrict yourself to what you know from your experience in Ireland. How would you establish that abuse had existed in a family for generations?

SW: Well it might be in the case histories.

JH: In other words the people doing it, would have told you it existed in their families for generations. And they would have told you that after consulting with lawyers. Marvellous. Was it in all the case histories?

SW: It was in some of them.

JH: So you say those buzz words "tradition" and "ignorance" explain the existence of what you encountered on that estate?

SW: Yes.

JH: How extensive was it?

SW: It was extensive. All over the estate.

JH: Is it possible that a paedophile ring had organised itself there? Some sort of secret brotherhood? An IRA gang or something of that sort?

SW: I wouldn't think so.

JH: You think that the causalities were tradition and ignorance.

SW: Mainly those.

JH: And do you not think the availability of porn movies and drugs, which were being supplied across the region from the late 1960s and early 1970s by the drug dealer who lives at my gate, do you not think those are more probable causative factors?

SW: Porn and drugs might play a part.

JH: But you prefer to think that tradition and ignorance is the main explanation for what you saw.

SW: I think tradition and ignorance are the main causes.

JH: I've got to tell you that pornography has a very disruptive effect on the male. I can't speak as to its effects on females. But all over the world highly credentialled, highly respected highly qualified doctors and psychologists are warning that a generation of men are significantly disrupted by pornography. It's driving people to suicide. Rape. Who knows what else.

SW: James the abuse of children has always existed. Even before porn and drugs.

JH: I agree there is nothing new under the sun, But I think I can argue that the systemic rape and violation of children has never existed on the present day scale.

SW: I'd say pornography and drugs are factors. They don't help. But I was seeing things going back years.

JH: When did you first encounter the level of abuse you're talking about?

SW: In 1995. In Rathangan.

JH: And when did you start in this line of work?

SW: I would have been going into people's homes in the 1950's.

JH: Was sexual abuse of children a factor then?

SW: I'm sure it was.

JH: Did you encounter it?

SW: Not knowingly. But we didn't know what to look for.  I saw terrible things. I saw terrible things in your town. In the rows of houses. Behind closed doors.

JH: What did you see?

SW: I saw poverty you wouldn't believe.

JH: Not a crime. What else?

SW: Ignorance.

JH: Alright. Ignorance. What else?

SW: Violence.

JH: Violence against the person?

SW: Yes.

JH: And that was the main thing you were encountering?

SW: We encountered it.

JH: Did Ron Baines kill his wife?

SW: I don't know that James.

JH: I knew him in my childhood. I have no reason to think ill of him. I always thought he was a nice man.

SW: I don't think he was a nice man.

JH: Anyway from the 1950's on, you did not knowingly encounter sexual abuse of children, Then in the 1990's you encountered it at a rate that was incredible.

SW: It was always there. It was just hushed up.

JH: What's your evidence for that?

SW: Well, the case histories. It runs in families.

JH: There's a kind of a self fulfilling prophecy here. If you won't rescue the children when you become aware they are being systematically violated, of course it's going to run in families. The policy of leaving them in those families is perpetuating the situation.

SW: Remember James the cases where a doctor wrongly accused parents of abusing their children.

JH: Yes, we need safeguards against that sort of thing. Obviously an incompetent, or more probably an evil person in a position of authority would be capable of accusing innocent people. If IRA gangs and paedophile rings and whatever other secret brotherhoods of evil exist in Ireland, can infiltrate the Judiciary, which they can, we might assume they would also be capable of infiltrating the social care professions. But I would caution you against your assumptions that justice prevailed in the cases where children were actually removed from families and the decision was later overturned. Some of those decisions were overturned using forensic testimony from doctors who repudiated the initial expert medical testimony from other doctors. What I'm trying to say is that my police sources had long ago alerted me to a situation whereby there is always a doctor willing to appear in court as a paid expert witness who will insist on the possibility that the initial forensic conclusions were unsafe. The cops were telling me in the 1980's that forensic evidence was becoming useless against big criminals because the big fish could always hire a professor who would claim whatever they wanted him to claim to discredit the evidence, I know of an abuse case in England, where the child was removed from her family home. The decision to remove her was overturned and the child was sent back to her parents. The broadcaster Anne Diamond gave the parents a pattycake interview on British television about their sufferings. It emerged years later that the couple were guilty, It works both ways. A decisive capacity to rescue children from families that are prostituting them could be misapplied. Sending them back can also be a mistake. Not having any capacity to help them at all beyond teaching their mothers to write, is unacceptable. We need to find ways... But I'm still putting it to you, that we need to find ways to rescue children who are being violated on a daily basis.

SW: I don't see...

JH: What happened in the estate you mentioned?

SW: The estate was bulldozed eventually. The place was levelled. It was unofficial government policy. All done under the guise of a rehousing programme.

JH: And the families were scattered.

SW: Presumably.

JH: And put living next door to other families who had no idea what they had been engaged in. 

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