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	Clerical Abuse Scandal Could Cost Church Dear Belfast Telegraph July 21, 2011 http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/clerical-abuse-scandal-could-cost-church-dear-16025487.html Even as late as 2002 there wasn't a single minister in the then Irish government who dared to say boo to a Catholic bishop. In fact, far from being diffident to the Church's crozier-carrying cadre, ministers were submissive supplicants. The greatest example of Irish Cabinet cravenness occurred in June of that year just after Bertie Ahern dissolved his first Fianna Fail-led administration and prepared for the general election that he so easily won. The very last act of that outgoing government was to concoct a deal that protected the Catholic Church from major financial punishment and instead transferred the burden of paying compensation to clerical abuse victims to the Republic's taxpayer. Dr Michael Woods was the minister in charge of the arrangement which ensured that while around €128m of Church assets would go into the fund to aid the victims, a whopping €1.3bn would be spent by the state in compensation claims. In effect the Irish treasury and hence the taxpayer was responsible for 90% of the payouts to more than 100,000 people who as children had been physically or sexually abused either by individual members of the clergy or in Church-run institutions such as the notorious Artane Industrial School in north Dublin. To many victims' organisations such as the independent, radical and tenacious Irish Survivors of Child Abuse (Soca) this behind-doors deal added insult to injury. It suggested to Irish Soca that the Catholic hierarchy still exercised undue influence on any government of the day in Dublin, even to the extent of shifting the financial costs of their clergy and religious orders crimes onto the public purse. Moreover, despite Fianna Fail's boast about being the "Republican Party" the Woods deal demonstrated to many secularists and pluralists in the Republic that in fact the party was more inclined to defend the "special position" (to quote from the Irish Constitution devised by De Valera) of the Catholic Church rather than create a wholly secular society. Yet how much has changed in the course of a decade! The present crop of ministers in the Irish Government come from a tradition of long standing opposition to Church power. The deputy Prime Minister or Tanaiste, Eamon Gilmore, cut his political teeth in the 70s, 80s and 90s while in The Workers Party and Democratic Left in its campaigns to secularise the Republic by introducing divorce, legalising homosexuality, promoting non-denominational education, making contraception freely available and even allowing for abortion information and the right of Irish women to travel to Britain for an abortion. Even in Fine Gael, which has deep roots in rural, conservative Catholic Ireland, many of its leading figures come from the liberal wing of the party, ie those who followed the late, great Garret FitzGerald's "Constitutional Crusade" of the 1980s when their then leader tried but failed to radically reform the Republic from a monolithic Catholic Church dominated state into a secular Republic. They include Justice Minister Alan Shatter, a FitzGeraldite-reformer who has warned the Catholic Church that he is to bring in a law making it illegal for anyone who fails to co-operate with any Garda Siochana criminal investigation culpable. Shatter's promised law is in direct response to the age old practice of the Irish Catholic Church trying to deal with abuser-clerics in secret, subject only to Canon as opposed to criminal law, away from public glare and often in the absence of any justice for the child-victims. The Cloyne Report last week marks yet another stage in the decline of the Catholic Church's temporal power in the Republic. The revelations of cover up that have even implicated the Vatican in this Co Cork diocese have been almost as shocking as the crimes committed on the young victims. There is a growing campaign on Facebook and other social network sites for the Irish State to expel the Papal Nuncio in protest at the Vatican's role in dissuading their Irish hierarchy from co-operating fully with the civil inquiries into allegations against priest-abusers in the diocese. Although it is probably unlikely the coalition will go that far, relations none the less between the Holy See and the Irish Government have reached an historic, new low. Expect harsh words from Gilmore, who also happens to be the Republic's foreign minister, when he meets with the Papal Nuncio to discuss the fall-out from the Cloyne Report. If those liberals and secularists within the Fine Gael-Labour Government wish to deliver a body blow to the Church's political power they should heed the demands of some of the organisations representing abuse victims. They have been demanding for some time that some high powered body, say for example the Dail's Public Accounts Committee, set up a special inquiry to revisit the 2002 Woods' deal with the Catholic Church. It would have the power to summon the minister and other cabinet colleagues from the time to explain their actions. For instance the tenacious Dail deputies on the PAC could ask for all communication between church and state running up to this final act of the Ahern government. The inquiry could also ask leading figures in the Church at the time to answer questions as to why they were able to wriggle out of their financial duty to the victims and get the taxpayer to fork out the funds in the main. All of this could be televised and recorded for radio. It would demonstrate surely and finally that in 2011, despite all its economic travails, in the Republic "Home Rule is definitely no longer Rome Rule."
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