Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence?

(From Irish Independent)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the religious orders have a champion. Her name is Florence Horsman-Hogan. Hogan, a nurse, spent some time in a religious run institution and has only happy memories of the nuns who cared for her.

She is a woman on a mission. She feels the religious orders have beenmercilessly traduced and that the whole country believes that anyone who ever spent time in a Church-run religious institution was the victim of sexual or physical abuse, or both. Not so, she says. She insists that there are lots of former residents like her who hadpositive experiences of the religious and who haven't spoken out yet.

To give such people a voice, she has recently set up an organisation called Let OurVoices Emerge. It has already attracted in the region of 300 members, she says.

Last weekend, at the behest of Hogan, the Christian Brothers issued a statement in whichthey denied that abuse was widespread or systematic in their institutions. To top it all off, Hogan began publicly stating that false claims of abuse were being made by former residents. With that, all hell broke loose.

The Christian Brothers were attacked for seeming to say that abuse in their homes waslimited to a few isolated incidents. Hogan was called a 'teacher's pet'. There were darkhints that she was acting as some kind of a front for the orders, and she was told that ifshe has evidence of false claims, then she should put up or shut up.

The same might be said to the Brothers, because if abuse in their institutions was neither systematic nor widespread as they say, then presumably many of the claims for compensation that have been submitted to the Redress Board, are false. Ditto for the1,700 cases currently before the Laffoy Commission.