Susan Irvine Russam

STATEMENT Today, at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin, survivors of child sexual abuse within St John Ambulance Ireland were told that the accused will not stand trial because he has been deemed medically unfit. I first came forward in 1999. After twenty-seven years, there will be no criminal trial. I reported the abuse because I believed that telling the truth would lead to justice. No charges were ever brought in relation to what was done to me. But the State did not doubt my account. My complaint was investigated by Tusla's retrospective abuse team, which found it to be founded. He appealed that finding and lost. An independent panel upheld it. The State's own child protection agency accepted what I had said. The criminal justice system never acted on it. Other survivors later came forward, and one account became part of a much wider and deeply disturbing picture. Files on this individual were referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions on a number of occasions. Each time, the decision was not to prosecute. Years passed. Survivors grew older. The accused grew older. Charges came only after the Shannon review, on the complaints of other survivors. Today we were told it is too late. That this was allowed to happen is a disgrace. It did not happen by accident. It happened because, time and again, the people with the power to act chose not to. I accept that every accused person has legal and constitutional rights, including the right to be fit to stand trial. I do not question those rights or the medical determination. But survivors have rights too. We have the right to ask why this process took twenty-seven years. We have the right to ask whether opportunities to prosecute were lost. We have the right to ask why earlier decisions not to prosecute were made, and whether they should now be examined in light of all that later emerged. And we have the right to ask whether the State's response to historical child sexual abuse is capable of delivering justice within the lifetimes of survivors and accused persons. Those questions do not go away because there is no trial. For years, we were asked to trust the system. We gave statements. We relived the worst experiences of our childhoods. We answered questions and we waited. When more survivors came forward, we did it all again. The human cost has been enormous. The Shannon review found serious and systemic failures within St John Ambulance Ireland, including awareness of risks to children and a culture that facilitated grooming. Survivors should not have to accept another institutional response that simply says the process is over. I am calling on the Garda Commissioner and the Director of Public Prosecutions to account publicly, insofar as the law permits, for the handling of these cases, including the decisions not to prosecute. I am also calling for an independent examination of how these complaints were handled from 1999 onwards: the Garda investigations, the prosecution decisions, the time the process took, and whether an earlier prosecution was possible. It must be carried out by someone independent of An Garda Síochána, the DPP and the Department of Justice. The institutions whose decisions are in question cannot be the ones examining them. Survivors of historical abuse across Ireland are watching. They need to know that if they walk into a Garda station and disclose what was done to them as children, they will be listened to, their complaints will be investigated promptly and fully, and they will not spend twenty-seven years wondering whether their case will ever reach a courtroom. When I came forward in 1999, I could not have imagined that I would still be asking the State for answers in 2026. There will be no criminal trial. But there must still be accountability. There must still be answers. And An Garda Síochána, the DPP and the other State institutions must not mistake the end of a prosecution for the end of their responsibility to survivors.