People should perhaps find out more about this before launching into the usual tired “pedophile priest” chants. Even the report is forced to admit that the sexual abuse in these reform schools was committed, in general, by the boys against each other, which is something that is common in all (non-Catholic) prison institutions and, in fact, even in upper class (non-Catholic) British boarding schools. The authorities do actually seem to have removed any brothers (these were Christian Brothers schools) who were preying upon the boys, and the complaint was that they would remove them and assign them to some other activity rather than turning them over to the police because the order treated it as a sin rather than a crime.
As for the brutality, that was common at any institution in the 1930s and 1940s, and while the religious orders should have acted with standards that were higher than those around them, everybody at that time thought that severe corporal punishment was good for erring young people and would set them straight. Maybe it did; most of the people who are complaining seem to have gone on to live productive lives in the intervening 60 or 70 years, until the lure of lawsuit money encouraged them to remember their severe trauma...
Thanks you! It gets so tiring to hear people attack a faith they know nothing of when the insidence of this is much higher among other religions and places where children gather but it seems the Church is the favorite target.
The Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy were more brutal than normal society of the time.