The ABUSE EXCUSE

More than four years ago, Hot Press called for a Tribunal of Inquiry into the Catholic Church s handling of the issue of child-sex abuse by priests. We have regularly repeated the call since. Now it has been taken up in another publication. Maybe we are getting somewhere.
The Sunday Tribune (February 1st) pointed out that formal inquiries have been undertaken into fraud in the beef industry, negligence in the blood transfusion service, the wealth of Charles Haughey and so forth. And that none of these matters is more important than the abuse of children.
In the week before the Tribune editorial, the Government did take action in relation to child sex abuse, suspending the funding of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association pending the outcome of an inquiry into its handling of the Derry O Rourke case. Former national coach O Rourke had been sentenced to 12 years for abusing female swimmers over a period of 16 years.
O Rourke was the second senior IASA figure exposed as a sex-abuser. Four years ago, another former national coach, George Gibney, had been named (in the Tribune) in the same context. Gibney is now in the United States and is working at a desk job for a food company in Denver, Colorado.
In the same week as O Rourke was sentenced, Fr. Ivan Payne of the Dublin archdiocese pleaded guilty to nine separate charges of child sex abuse. It was the facts of the Payne case which prompted the Tribune, noting the action already taken in regard to O Rourke s case, to call for an inquiry into the Catholic Church, too.
It had emerged that years before Payne was brought before the courts, authorities in the Dublin archdiocese had been aware that he d been named as a sex abuser by a former altar boy, Andrew Madden. Despite this, the archdiocese appointed Payne a judge in the Catholic Marriage Tribunal. Payne was retained in this position even after gardai had informed archbishop Desmond Connell that he was being investigated for further incidents in which children had been violated.
In an RTE interview in 1995, Dr. Connell denied point-blank ever having used Church money to fund a pay-off to victim of a paedophile priest. When RTE re-broadcast an interview with Andrew Madden which suggested that Dr. Connell had personally sanctioned a loan of #30,000 from the Church to Fr. Payne for precisely this purpose, the archbishop claimed that the matter had slipped my mind .
Of course, the argument for a Tribunal does not rest on one case, but on a pattern of the Church, at a high administrative level, covering up instances of abuse and helping abusers to escape justice.
We know of two cases involving the Swimming Association, both in Dublin. We know of a dozen times that number involving the Catholic Church, in dioceses including Dublin, Down and Connor, Dromore, Clogher, Ferns, Ossory, Armagh, Cork, Clonfert, Elphin, Galway, Raphoe and Tuam.
We know that in a number of these cases Church officials, having been made aware of the allegations, acted not to protect the children and bring the culprit to book but to protect the Church and allow the guilty to go free.
Documentary evidence to this effect exists and would readily be made available to an inquiry. The evidence includes letters full of pain to senior Church figures describing the abuse of children and the effect on the victims and their families, and letters of acknowledgement offering sympathy and prayer.
The case for State intervention is stronger for the fact that some of the victims were, in theory anyway, in the case of the State at the time they were abused. I have described before a case in which representatives of the State drove a child who was in care to an institution and handed him over to a cleric who commenced abuse literally within minutes of the State functionaries departing.
Additionally, the State has a particular responsibility to children abused by Catholic clerics given that the State s conferral of control of broad areas of education and child-care on the Church has been a major factor in putting representatives of the Church in a position to carry out the abuse.
It is commonly argued that all, or almost all, of this is in the past, from a time when little was known of child sex abuse and Church authorities were less wise in the ways of the world. It is a flimsy defence the abusers presumably knew they were doing wrong, and their superiors when informed knew that wrong had been done.
That aside, the belief that the Church has learned the lesson was scarcely sustained by Cardinal Cahal Daly s address last July to a Summer School at All Hallows on The Media And The Church , to which I have alluded before. The Cardinal spoke then of the hurt felt by bishops and priests that their treatment by the media, and explained where he believed this unfair treatment had sprung from.
The almost universal and seemingly uncritical espousal of . . . the liberal agenda inevitably disposes media to be critical of the Churches, but particularly and selectively of the Catholic Church.
Specifically in relation to child sex-abuse, he declared that: It could well be argued . . . that the amount of space and time devoted to comment and speculation has been disproportionate . And at any rate, the Church now had clear and public guidelines for dealing with the issue.
What s publicly clear, particularly after the Payne case, is the refusal of Church authorities to face up to their responsibility, and the consequent strength of the argument for State action.
In practical terms, we need a TD to put a motion on the Dail order paper calling for the establishment of an inquiry under the Tribunals Act of 1921 to investigate and publish the facts of the matter insofar as they can be established. Such an inquiry would have the powers of the High Court to subpoena witnesses and documents.
It could compel the production of letters and records held in diocesan and other Church archives relating to complaints of child abuse and the action, if any, taken in response.
It scarcely need saying that no TD is likely to submit such a motion if there isn t sufficient public pressure to give him/her confidence this won t spell the end of a political career.
It would be useful, then, to hear of calls from trade union branches, community and voluntary organisations and student societies, and of letters to politicians and newspaper editors, supporting the proposal.
If the truth which has been seeping out for years about child sex abuse by Catholic clergy had emerged in relation to any other organisation or interest group, the Tribunal would already be well under way.
To take this view is not to pick on the Catholic Church in furtherance of some liberal agenda . It is to ask that the Catholic Church be treated no differently from any other institution.
Not discrimination, but parity of esteem. n