IRELAND
Herald News Daily
Staff and agencies
25 October, 2005
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, Ireland - Former bishops, police and state agencies did far too little to prevent the alleged sexual abuse of more than 100 children by Roman Catholic priests in southeast Ireland over a 36-year period, a report published Tuesday charged.
The report also found that Ireland‘s national police force rarely investigated complaints of abuse properly — and kept no records of any such cases before 1988. In addition, it said officials at government-appointed health boards sometimes failed to act on reports of abuse.
"Many people would not have suffered abuse had the people with knowledge about it acted in a timely matter," he said. "It‘s only when the whole truth about this comes out that we‘ll be able to pick up the pieces."
Murphy‘s investigation involved the interviewing of more than 100 alleged victims of abuse by 21 priests — eight of whom have since died — from 1966 to 2002. Allegations against five other priests were included in an appendix.