IRELAND
Irish Examiner
LET’S start with some facts: homosexuality is not illegal. Child abuse is.
Homosexuality involves sexual activity between two people above the age of consent, with the agreement of both. Paedophilia, and child sexual abuse, involves subjecting children to sexual activities to satisfy, if only temporarily, the warped and perverse sexual urges of the perpetrator.
Only outright homophobes would ever suggest the two acts are similar or connected. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has recently stated the opposite, that there is no connection between the two whatsoever.
Victims of abuse within the diocese of Ferns included 10 young girls in one case. There is certainly no link with homosexuality there. Yet, despite abundant contradictory evidence, both within his own article, your paper’s editorial, and the press at large, Rónán Mullen (Irish Examiner, October 26) attempts insidiously to suggest that this might be the case. Abuse of boys by priests within the Catholic Church has been reported for hundreds of years, a very long time before ‘homosexual subcultures’ grew up in the 1960s, in seminaries or elsewhere.