We were sitting around, chewing the fat. The conversation fell to Sean Brady. You’ve heard of him. The Cardinal. A couple of days previously, The Sunday Independent had carried the story about the legal action being taken against him by a victim of clerical sexual abuse – and since then reams of ever more damning information had been emerging. The story had opened up a whole new gruesome can of worms…

In 1975, Sean Brady, then a priest, was requested by the Bishop of Kilmore, Francis McKiernan, to conduct a Canonical Investigation into allegations made by a couple of children, one aged ten, the other fourteen, who had been victims of the serial paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth.
Brady was 35 years old at the time and was entrusted with this role for a reason: he was highly regarded by the senior powers in the Irish Catholic Hierarchy. What happened subsequently is not in dispute. Sean Brady heard their evidence and believed it: he knew then that Brendan Smyth had abused these children monstrously. In all probability he also knew that they were not alone in this. So what did he do?
For a start, he told the children that they had to sign an oath of secrecy about their evidence, which they did. No parents or other non-clerical adults were present at the time.
The silence of the victims thus secured, he completed his report, recommending that the Norbertine order should be instructed that Brendan Smyth be removed from the Ministry. And, if we are to believe Sean Brady’s own evidence, that was the end of the matter. He promptly did nothing else, forgot about it and moved on.
Brendan Smyth was removed from his ministry as a diocesan priest but he continued to practice as a Norbertine and was later sent to the US. Neither Church nor State authorities there were told of his paedophilia and he carried on abusing children in the most appalling manner.
We looked at the evidence. In 1975, Sean Brady had been offered a unique opportunity to finally stop this monstrous predator. He knew the horrors that Brendan Smyth had inflicted on children, and what he was capable of doing again. Yet he did nothing beyond filing the report – and thus he directly facilitated the abuse carried out by Brendan Smyth between 1975 and 1994, when the abuser was finally brought before the courts in Northern Ireland.
And so we talked about the reasons that Sean Brady initially gave for his failure to act; and we considered the fact that he had not reported Brendan Smyth to the Gardaí. Far from recognising the extent of his failure, Sean Brady’s first response was to say that he had done his duty. What duty? His duty as an adult standing up for children under threat? His duty as a concerned citizen of Ireland? No. The only ‘duty’ he did was as a priest, doing the business of protecting the Catholic Church on behalf of Rome.
“It’s not fair,” Sean Brady complained on Morning Ireland on RTÉ, “to judge actions of 35 years ago by the standards we are following today.” This gave us further pause for thought. We kicked it around a bit. My blood started to boil. Someone asked: can he really be serious? He was 35 years old at the time. He was in the prime of his life. And he was made specifically aware of the fact that this man – forget the fact that he was a priest – was going around bullying children, imposing himself on them, raping them. And it never struck Mr. Brady, citizen, that he had a moral obligation to report monstrous crimes of this nature to the relevant civil authorities?
It beggars belief that “standards” could ever have existed that would have allowed children to be used and abused in this utterly scandalous way. What the fuck was wrong with these people?
Christ! Jesus! I’ll tell you what was wrong. I knew it as a kid. I felt it in my bones at every contact with the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church and everything that happened subsequently confirmed it. They didn’t give a shit about children, except in as much as they wanted to control them and their education, the better to consolidate their position as power brokers in Irish society. Brutalisation of children happened under their watch as a matter of routine. Brutalisation of children was perpetrated by their staff – by priests and brothers, and to a lesser extent nuns – as a matter of routine. Not every priest or brother held children in contempt. Of course. But as an institution, the Catholic Church did.
Because it is, root and branch, a thoroughly authoritarian institution that puts its own interests before those of anyone, and everyone, and everything else. Without exception.
We thought about the reference to 35 years and someone said hang on. Hang on. This fella doesn’t want to be judged for what he did 35 years ago according to today’s standards. But surely the standards, on which everything he does is supposed to be based, were set down 2,000 years ago in the teachings of Jesus Christ? Has something changed dramatically in those teachings? Have they been rewritten?
We started to laugh. Ah Jesus. There was an element of desperation to the laughter; in fact we were close to tears. These are the very people who want us all to be locked to (their interpretation of) the words recorded in the New Testament. They insist that we are locked to precepts that were expounded in a particular place and time by a man in his thirties – a man who died at the age of 33, two years younger than Sean Brady when he heard the evidence against Brendan Smyth! – and they are telling us that it is not fair to judge something done 35 years ago by today’s standards. Jesus wept. It defies credulity. It really does.
But then we started to think of the really sinister aspect of it all. Bad enough that Sean Brady didn’t go to the police. Bad enough that he allowed Brendan Smyth to go on abusing innocent children for years and years. But what about the oath that he imposed on the children so that they were afraid ever to say anything in case that in itself might send them plunging into everlasting flames?
What about the oath?
Thinking about this made us sick. And the more we thought about it, the sicker it made us feel. A child of ten forced to take an oath to shut up forever about being sexually abused by a priest. Induced into this by the man who has since progressed to the status of Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. By the man who is now Primate of All Ireland. This is what abusers do. They trick the children into silence. ‘This is our secret’. ‘Promise you won’t tell’. And the children suffer endlessly because of their inability to speak.
And so we decided that, yes, in fact he was an accessory to a cover-up. Yes, he was guilty of perversion of the course of justice. Yes he had committed a crime against those children, in using his power, the power of the cloth, and of the collar, to silence them. And yes he had committed a crime against all of the children who were subsequently abused, because – by securing the silence of the children giving evidence to him – he had saved Brendan Smyth from being dealt with sooner, much sooner, by the proper authorities, the courts of the land.
We did not mean to be harsh in our judgement. But this is the conclusion we came to. This is the only conclusion we could come to.
But we are not in the offices of the Gardaí or
the DPP…