Ireland on Edge As Church Sex Abuse Report Nears, Sydney Morning Herald, August 31, 2011

Ireland on Edge As Church Sex Abuse Report Nears

Sydney Morning Herald
August 31, 2011

http://www.smh.com.au/world/ireland-on-edge-as-church-sex-abuse-report-nears-20110830-1jk1v.html

Damning revelations: An investigation into clerical sex abuse in the Catholic diocese of Raphoe, in County Donegal, is about to report its findings.

THE bucolic peace of County Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland, is about to be shattered by a report into the paedophiles, both clergy and laity, who abused children for decades.

An investigation into clerical sex abuse in the Catholic diocese of Raphoe, in County Donegal, is about to report its findings, which are expected to be damning. New evidence has also emerged from victims of a parallel paedophile ring operating in the same Gaelic-speaking corner of the republic.

Several victims of abuse have said that lay members of the church as well as priests sexually exploited them for years. And as with the expected conclusion of the report into Raphoe, they say the national police service, the Garda, was complicit in a culture of cover-up that allowed the perpetrators to carry on abusing them.

John O'Donnell has said that he was abused by a lay member of a church choir. "He assaulted me from when I was nine until I was 15, until I was old enough to know it was wrong," he said. "This man took advantage because I was adopted and regarded as something lower than most kids in the area. The abuse took place at his home and in a shop he ran. It went on from 1965 to 1972."

He said that in 1973 he went to a police station to report that he had been raped by the man, who has since died.

"A local guard was outraged that I was naming such a fine, upstanding member of the community as a child rapist," he said.

"The officer slapped me on the face and told me to get out. He said to me that I was adopted and not worth anything." For years, Mr O'Donnell hid what had happened to him, and got married and raised a family without discussing it. It was only in the late 1990s when revelations of widespread child abuse rocked the Irish Catholic Church that he decided to act.

"I found out that my abuser was still in the church choir and I was outraged because he was working with children.

"So I drove up to a parochial house in the area and tried to speak to the parish priest about this man. At the time I had finally got somewhere with the Garda and they had questioned this man in a Donegal police station. I informed the parish priest about this, but he wouldn't even let me across his door.

"He kept saying: 'No, no, no. I am not speaking to you about this.' He didn't want to know, and bear in mind, this was only back in 2005."

Mr O'Donnell has claimed that other victims in this corner of Donegal are coming forward. Police are investigating their claims. Others in Donegal have made similar allegations. Throughout the decades of denial, the young men who were preyed on by paedophiles had one champion - a retired police detective, Martin Ridge.

Mr Ridge moved to the county at the end of his career, and became so disturbed by official indifference that he wrote a book, Breaking the Silence.

He predicted that the Raphoe report would be "damning" and would expose the same culture of "local denial and cover-up" that was found in other Catholic dioceses across Ireland. Mr Ridge admitted the police force he served in all his working life would not be spared withering criticism in the report.

Two years ago the Murphy report into widespread clerical abuse of children in Dublin, Ireland's largest Catholic diocese, found that senior Garda officers colluded with four archbishops and top clerics in covering up the sex crimes of priests on a massive scale in the city.