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The Real Evil Within

The venal, rotten truth about Irish politics has been exposed for the world to see – but what about the far more serious crimes perpetuated against children by the Catholic church? How can those who were party to such outrages continue to go unpunished?

Eamonn McCann, 11 Apr 2012

Now that Fianna Fáil has been thwarted in its ambition to burn the country down for the insurance money, perhaps we can at last begin to deal with the uglier corruption that moulders within.

 

Bertie Ahern never colluded in the rape of a child and then threatened the victim with eternal damnation if the crime was reported.

Fianna Fáil harboured liars, frauds and thieves but never encouraged a culture of child molestation.

Bertie is out on his ear, with only ill-gotten gains for comfort in the cold. And commentators have given Enda Kenny a passing dig with the elbow for standing with State-sponsored billionaire Denis O’Brien to bang the drum at the New York Stock Exchange. But cardinal sinner Sean Brady has blithely announced that he will be taking the role of “Principal Presider” during brass-necked Benedict’s visit in June and nobody seems to have balked.

Brady has admitted that during his ‘70s stint as secretary to the Bishop of Kilmore, he required two teenagers to take vows of silence after they’d come to him with complaints of sexual abuse by Fr. Brendan Smyth. Many of the 90 offences against children of which Smyth was eventually convicted took place after Brady had silenced the victims.

The FF cabal which robbed the people and ruined the Republic has been entirely discredited and discarded from public life. But the Catholic hierarchy of hypocrisy remains unchanged.

The report last month from the seven (!) teams of top-notch sin-sniffers deployed to Ireland by the Holy See revealed that Benedict felt “betrayed” by the Irish Church’s inadequate response to the sex abuse problem. The Holy See, the Visitators explained, had sent them to “assist the local Church on her path of renewal.”

But if the scandal has resulted from the local Church straying off the right road, what are we to make of the similar scenarios emerging in Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Austria, Tanzania, Australia, South Africa, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, the Philippines, Croatia, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Italy, Malta, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Argentina?



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