BishopAccountability.org
	Church and Child Safeguards Irish Times May 16, 2011 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0516/1224297032707.html THERE IS A depressing sense of déjà vu about last week's annual report of the Catholic Church's National Board for Safeguarding Children (NBSC), a sense once again of good people frustrated, doing a key job but swimming against a tide of a conservative clerical bureaucracy. Despite repeated expressions of concern and public statements of acceptance of the need for new procedures and a changed internal culture, inertia reigns in the church. John Morgan, the board's lay chairman, puts it down to entrenched "clericalism" and speaks, as others have before to apparently little avail, of a need for "a new relationship between the clerical caste and lay people". The board reports delays and constraints on its vital work surveying child protection practice throughout the church, unexplained failures to report new allegations of abuse to it, and new budget constraints on the board's important training programmes for clergy and laity for which demand continues to increase. Most worrying is the delay in the board's comprehensive review of the dioceses' work, a project stymied by the very people who set it up. The three sponsoring bodies, the Bishops' Conference, the Conference of Religious of Ireland, and the Irish Missionary Union, announced, in what has become an all-too-regular refrain in the child protection saga, that lawyers were advising that collaboration with the board would breach their obligations under data protection law. NBSC chief executive Ian Elliott acknowledges that they have a right to express concern, but insists the board's practice in this regard "fully complies with data protection legislation as it exists in both jurisdictions on the island". The church, however, does not have "can do" lawyers; its default mode remains defensive and protective of its clergy first and foremost. After lengthy negotiations involving the three bodies, and talks with the data commissioner's office, an agreement has now been reached that has allayed such privacy fears and will allow the board to continue its review work. The board has committed itself, however, not to publish or comment publicly on its findings on individual dioceses or church bodies without the permission of their respective heads. So much for transparency. The board speculates that its difficulties in tracking accurately the level of abuse notification may also have been linked to perceptions about data privacy legal issues. Its draft report had been about to report a significant decline in reported cases, down to 53 from 197 on the year, when a renewed request for information bewilderingly produced a dramatically higher figure of 272 complaints to dioceses and religious orders. Reassuringly, however, it reports that all the cases, the bulk of them historic, were duly notified to the State authorities where victim and alleged abuser were identifiable. It is to be hoped that the board's report and its discussions with the Apostolic Visitation sent by Pope Benedict will help inspire a new sense of urgency. "If you safeguard children within the church," Elliott contends rightly, "you will safeguard the church itself."
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