Abuse Only Matters When Its the Church, by David Quinn, Irish Independent, July 24, 2009

Abuse Only Matters When It's the Church

By David Quinn
Irish Independent
July 24, 2009

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/abuse-only-matters-when-its-the-church-1838178.html

Sometime in the next few days or weeks the report into child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese will be published. Unless we have suffered outrage fatigue as a result of the Ryan report, we will once again work ourselves into paroxysms of rage upon its publication.

Furious voices will fill the airwaves. Politicians will tear their garments. But while the outrage will be justified, for the most part it will be hypocritical. Why hypocritical? Because in the final analysis, I'm not sure whether we care about child protection as much as we think we do.

Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin should be placed in charge of implementing the State's child protection policy. He would be able to ensure that children are properly protected

Alan Shatter is the best informed politician we have on this issue. In the Dail debate on the Ryan report he delivered an excellent speech on the topic of child protection and he did not restrict himself to talking merely about the past, unlike many of his fellow deputies. He also talked about the present, and the innumerable failings of the State in this regard.

He marshalled many pertinent facts in making his case and it is extremely doubtful that anything more than a tiny percentage of us are aware of even one of these facts. That tells its own tale.

Here is one such fact. In the last six years 20 children have died while in the care of the Health Service Executive. For the most part these deaths were avoidable. One of the 20 died of a drug overdose, for example. That should not have happened.

Shatter asked the HSE how many children in its care have died in the last 10 years. At the time of the speech, and despite having several months to collate the information, it couldn't tell him.

Here is another fact. In 2007 23,268 reports on child abuse, neglect and child welfare concerns were made to the HSE. In one-third of these cases, or 8,194 in total, not even an initial assessment was conducted.

Of course, this could be a matter of scarce resources, or bureaucratic inefficiency, or a lack of productivity, or sheer indolence, but if we cared about child abuse as much as we think we do we would be sufficiently outraged by the fact that thousands of cases of possible child abuse and neglect go un-assessed, let alone fixed, that we would do something about it.

Here is one more fact. A year ago a review of the State's child protection policy -- 'Children First' -- was published. It found holes all over the system. One finding was that in only 13pc of child protection cases are the HSE and the Garda acting in full accordance with the 'Children First' guidelines. This is devastating.

This enormous, three-volume review is basically gathering dust. Outside of official circles, almost no one has heard of it.

If a similar review of the Catholic Church's current child protection procedures found similar failings we know that it would be the subject of newspaper headlines and maybe even specially commissioned RTE documentaries.

But when the review of 'Children First' was published a year ago it received almost no coverage. Why not?

Why the lack of interest in this review?

Why the lack of interest in those aforementioned 20 deaths? Why the lack of interest in the thousands of suspected child abuse and neglect cases that are not assessed, year after year after year?

Barring certain exceptional cases, why do we save most of our outrage for those child abuse cases that involve priests and religious? The most charitable explanation is that such cases reveal the enormous hypocrisy of an institution that holds itself morally above all other institutions.

But, even if we allow for this explanation, it still means we are more concerned about Church hypocrisy than about child abuse itself.

Perhaps there is some other explanation for why we are generally more outraged at child abuse by clergy than by virtually any other kind of child abuse, but it would be good to hear it. It would be reassuring to hear it.

While we await this explanation we must find some way of making the media and the public as interested in the protection of children by the State as they are in protection of children by the Church.

With tongue-only-slightly-in-cheek, may I suggest the answer to this conundrum is to put a cleric in charge of implementing the State's child protection policy? May I also suggest that the cleric be the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin?

There is probably no person in the country in a position of responsibility who is more diligent about protecting children than him. He will have the necessary ruthlessness and determination to ensure that 'Children First' is properly implemented and children are properly protected.

In addition to Diarmuid Martin being the right person, the fact that he is a priest will mean that for the first time ever the media and the public will take as big an interest in State child protection issues as they do in Church child protection issues because they will be waiting for him to fail.

Problem solved.