Innocent Voices UK

 

Letter From Martin Ridge.

I am deeply humbled and honoured that my book ‘Breaking the Silence’ and the setting up of this website is attributed to me.(Innocent Voices UK) I would attribute my gratitude to the many good people who spoke out against this grave injustice that was caused to so many people. It has caused shock waves and also so much destruction and misery to human lives.

Abuse is a serious issue and has many consequences, some lead to despair, depression, break down of relationships. It can cause a reliance on abuse of drugs, alcohol and the misuse thereof. The ‘Shame’ is a barrier to speak out. Shame buries secrets but shame also buries lives and causes human misery.

You should be forever grateful to those good people who have set up this website. Reaching out that helping hand is a caring gesture. You don’t have to suffer alone, there is help there.

The ‘Shame’ of abuse only isolates where one can feel a sense of abandonment. Would you abandon a child?. Every life does matter.

My words are inadequate to thank those who have spoken out. Don’t ‘weep silently alone’. Silent tears are harrowing. People do care about you. There is help available. Don’t hesitate, ‘your life is worth it’. Barriers of shame must be broken. IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT, don’t have any misguided loyalty. Don’t suffocate with this horror, many have. There is a caring hand there now, your dignity is so important.

With God’s love and understanding, you will get there. A Silent Prayer does not go astray. I wish you luck as I pray for you too.

Very best wishes, Martin Ridge.

 

  Garda breaks the silence of abuse

  

Sunday 20 april 2008 by John Burke

While the focus on policing in Donegal in the mid-1990s was on garda corruption, Detective Martin Ridge was working quietly to bring justice to the countless victims of sex abuse.

‘I do not go to Mass any more, although I probably pray more than I ever did,” says ex-detective Martin Ridge. Connemara-born Ridge had been a member of the Garda Siochána for 28 years by the time he arrived in Falcarragh in Donegal to take up a uniformed posting, after his wife had been offered a teaching position in the north-west.

‘‘When I arrived in the area in 1994, it was like a normal community, the type you would find anywhere in Ireland at the time,” he says of the place where he still lives, a remote nook of the north-west Gaeltacht.

The image of a rural idyll did not remain long, as revealed in Ridge’s memoirs, Breaking the Silence, which details the history of sexual assault and rape that later emerged when he and his colleague, the now-retired detective John Dooley, began speaking to young people about rumours of child sexual abuse in the area.

‘‘The abuse that emerged – that started as far back as the 1960s and continued to the 1990s – amounted to four decades of rape and concealment of that rape,” Ridge says.

Dozens of children were being abused by four paedophiles in an area that stretched from Gortahork, on the northern tip of the Donegal coast, south to Leitermacaward and Glenties, and west to Annagry and Kincasslagh.

Almost six years since his retirement, 60year-old Ridge recalls the stigma felt by the victims, and by those who revealed themselves to the officers but were reluctant to go public.

‘‘We met the victims in the dark of night. The stigma in a rural community, as you can imagine, was horrendous. The victims were the ones who were wronged, but they had such fear and shame about the abuse becoming known,” he says.

Only one of dozens of victims later agreed to waive their anonymity following charges being brought in court.

In Ridge, living locally, married to a respected teacher and having two young daughters going to school in the area, members of the community found a trusted confidant when the Gardaí began investigating abuse allegations in 1997.

‘‘The victims didn’t come to the Garda station – that may say something about the fear of institutional power that they developed. They sought me out personally. I would meet with them to talk. Only once did someone feel comfortable with me visiting them in their home. Many of the victims did not want their parents to know. It was a terribly sad situation. They felt they had let their parents down in some way.”

Ridge investigated the cases of Catholic priest Eugene Greene and teacher Denis McGinley, who were among the most sadistic of sex abusers.

Greene, who violently abused altar boys in different parishes for almost 20 years, was sentenced to 12 years in jail in 2000.He is due for release later this year.

McGinley was sentenced to 30 months imprisonment on 21 sample charges and has since been released.

A third man – whose name has never been revealed to protect the identity of his victims – abused young boys in the 1970s and 1980s in the Annagry area. He received a 12-year sentence in September 1999.This man is due for release in August.

Another offender, Jimmy O’Donnell, was sentenced to four years in jail on 26 sample counts of abuse in his native Kincasslagh. O’Donnell was released last December.

Curiously, the spark of information that led Ridge and Dooley to probe paedophile activities in the Donegal Gaeltacht was, in fact, a complaint by one of the offenders – Greene – of a blackmail attempt.

‘‘So many of the young victims – good young people whose lives were destroyed almost systematically – are not around to tell their stories,” Ridge says of his inspiration to write down his account of the crimes.

‘‘I came across victims of abuse who had become addicted to alcohol and drugs. They had failed marriages and suffered horrendous psychological scars due to what had happened to them. They felt like they were at fault, somehow.

‘‘I believe that some of those victims ended their own lives.”

However, Ridge’s closeness to the investigation took its toll. ‘‘After about a year or 18 months, I felt trapped. Four decades of abuse had occurred and here I was taking in all this information, in the most graphic detail. People were telling me their innermost secrets and opening up tome like they never had to anyone else before. It was almost confessional.”

In 1976, a complaint was made to another priest in Gortahork about Greene.

He disappeared for a period of time but returned, to the surprise of the family affected, who were told that he would not ‘‘interfere’’ with their son again. ‘‘He even wrote to the family himself – thanking them for the way they handled the affair; it was the arrogance of someone who felt he was untouchable.”

The bishop of the diocese, Dr Philip Boyce, has said publicly that he was first made aware of an allegation against Greene in 1998.

In the case of teacher Denis McGinley, a parent complained to a local curate in June 1984. McGinley was back teaching that September and continued to abuse boys in the school for 11 years.

Ridge says the Greene case and revelations about widespread abuse, such as the Ferns case, has challenged his faith as a born and raised Roman Catholic.

‘‘I never set out to write a book that was deliberately anti-clerical. I know there are many fine priests. I have had great support and letters of encouragement from priests who say ‘well done’ for getting this information out into the open, after I wrote the book.

‘‘I simply can’t get over the resistance that there was, within elements of the Church, to the release of documents and information concerning young Irish kids who were abused by members of religious orders. I have the same difficulty when it comes to the institutions who were in charge of education and health policy at the time. Where is there a sign of them really taking responsibility in relation to the abuse that children suffered?

‘‘My family, my wife and daughters, remained as Mass-goers, but I just could not bring myself to return to the fold.”

Breaking the Silence by Martin Ridge is published by Gill & Macmillan at €13

Breaking The SilencePosted by Innocent Voices under Martin Ridge | Tags: abuse, Books, Ireland, martin, police, ridge | (edit this)
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