Monday, January 5, 2009
RONAN McGREEVY
A PRIEST who has been walking for nine days to atone for clerical sex abuse will finish his walk tomorrow when he arrives at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral.
Fr Michael Mernagh (70) began his trek in Cobh, Co Cork, on December 29th and has walked more than 150 miles to date.
Fr Michael Mernagh (70) began his trek in Cobh, Co Cork, on December 29th and has walked more than 150 miles to date.
He held a vigil on Christmas Eve outside St Colman’s Cathedral to protest against the Diocese of Cloyne’s handling of sex abuse claims and the Church’s other failings over clerical sex abuse.
Fr Mernagh said he had been blessed by the weather on his journey which has been remarkably dry for the time of the year and by the dozens of people who had joined him on his walk.
“The more I have walked the more I feel it [child sex abuse] is widespread beyond our comprehension. I don’t think priests or bishops understand how widespread and serious it is.”
He will walk from Blessington, Co Wicklow, to Rathfarnham, where he trained as a priest, today.
People will be shocked by sex abuse report, says archbishop
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin: "The Ferns Report shocked clergy, the church, the nation. It would be foolish not to realise that this will also be the case now."
'staggering' 400 people are known or suspected to have suffered clerical sex abuse at the hands of priests in the Dublin diocese, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin tells Patsy McGarry
It would be fair to say that few institutions face 2009 with such dread as the Catholic Church in Ireland. Not alone will it have to deal with the effects on its services of the economic downturn and its losses on the stock market, but it must also anticipate publication of four separate reports on clerical child sex abuse from among those in its ranks.
It begins this week, on Wednesday, when Minister of State for Children Barry Andrews will present a HSE national audit on child protection practices in all the State's Catholic dioceses, including Cloyne, to the Cabinet.
Later this month the church's own independent watchdog, its National Board for Safeguarding Children (NBSC) in the Catholic Church in Ireland, will present its audit of such practices in all Catholic dioceses on the island.
Then, at the end of the month, the report from the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation into how the archdiocese handled allegations of clerical child sex abuse between January 1st, 1975, and April 30th, 2004, is expected to be published.
No one believes it will make for pleasant reading.
And in February, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is expected to publish its report on the abuse of children in reformatories, industrial schools and orphanages run by 18 Catholic religious congregations throughout the State. This year promises to be yet another annus horribilis for the Catholic Church in Ireland.
Where the Dublin Commission is concerned, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin is "happy it is coming to a conclusion. I hope they have time to finish it and don't have to truncate its work unilaterally". He is under no illusions as to what is expected.
"People are going to be shocked," he said.
...
Archbishop Martin said he had been giving out figures covering the 68-year period since 1940, which is over twice the time span being inquired into by the commission as he wished to accommodate living memory and every priest of the archdiocese ordained since 1940. It was also the case that "our detection rate, as opposed to the rest of society, is very high", he said.
He recalled how "over the last few years there has been a growing awareness of the effects abuse has on children and how it doesn't go away. I presented 66,000 documents to the commission, which I read in large part. It was not nice reading. It was revolting. Saying 'sorry' is all I can say, but it doesn't mend people's lives," he said.
In the weeks before Christmas he had meetings with priests of the archdiocese to prepare them for publication of the commission report. He couldn't even tell them about his own dealings with the commission, as "it's an offence".
But as a general observation on its work, he found the commission's conduct of the investigation "very beneficial . . . with no leaks".
He won't know what is in the report until it comes out, but suspects that "a lot of priests will be very hurt" by its findings.
Charity wants gardaí to deal with clerical abuse cases
ONE IN Four, the charity that provides support for people who have suffered sexual abuse, has said "all discretionary action regarding the safeguarding of children be removed from the church".
Responding to the ongoing controversy about how allegations of clerical sex abuse were handled in Cloyne, the charity said at the weekend that all allegations of sexual abuse should be "referred immediately as a matter of course to the HSE and the gardaí, the only authorities who have the expertise and competence to investigate allegations".
However, Catholic bishops have repeatedly called for changes in legislation to be made in the Republic so they can fully comply with State requests for all information they possess on child sex abuse allegations.
Bishops in cross-Border dioceses have been supplying all such information to the Northern Ireland authorities, while still being unable to do so in the Republic.
Bishop Leo O'Reilly of Kilmore diocese and chairman of the Bishops's Commission on Education, has told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Science in the past that the Catholic Church here was fully in favour of mandatory reporting where this was protected by law and State policy.
He said the Ferns Report (2005) had called for legal changes to be made in relation to reporting of cases and on "executive privilege", to protect those participating in inter-agency groups with gardaí and health authorities from potential legal actions relating to suspicions, rumour, innuendo or complaints that were "demonstrably untrue".
He also called for the "introduction of a system of vetting and clearance similar to the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (Pocva) system operated in Northern Ireland ".
He said an all-island system was required. "Indeed a European-wide system would be welcome," he said.
The Pocva system allows for agencies to share what was described as "soft information" - rumour or anecdotal evidence that a person could pose a danger to children.
Last March, in a submission by the Catholic bishops to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children they described as "a critical area" under consideration by the committee, "the provision of legal authority for the collection and exchange of information relating to the risk or actual occurrence of child sexual abuse".
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