No Clergy to Be Prosecuted after Three-year Probe

By Maeve Sheehan
Irish Independent
July 21, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/no-clergy-to-be-prosecuted-after-threeyear-probe-29436105.html

Co-operated: Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin allowed the investigation team access to diocese files

NOT a single Catholic bishop or priest will be prosecuted for covering up the scandal of clerical sex abuse over several decades at the end of a three-year Garda investigation.

The enormous and time-consuming investigation involved a team of 12 to 14 detectives who interviewed more than 800 witnesses over three years.

The probe was launched in 2009 after the Murphy report on clerical abuse in the Dublin archdiocese revealed how the Catholic priests and bishops colluded with state authorities and gardai to shield paedophile priests.

Detectives were unable to build a case against surviving clergy for secretly moving paedophiles from parish to parish during the Eighties and Nineties because covering up for child abusers was not a specific offence at the time.

New laws, such as reckless endangerment of children and defilement of a child, were passed only six years ago, while withholding information on child abuse became a criminal offence last year.

Senior Garda sources confirmed to the Sunday Independent this weekend that the case was now closed, without a single member of the clergy facing prosecution.

"Unless new evidence emerges or someone comes forward, the investigation is done and dusted," a senior source said.

The then Garda Commissioner, Fachtna Murphy, launched the inquiry in 2009, saying its focus was to establish whether the failings of the Church and state authorities "amounted to criminal behaviour".

He appointed an assistant commissioner, John O'Mahony, to report back on possible crimes, with a view to forwarding them to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Sources said Dublin Archdiocese, under Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, co-operated fully and opened up the files to the investigation team.

More than 800 people were interviewed, including serving and retired priests, bishops and cardinals, along with victims of abuse and members of An Garda Siochana.

Sources said the investigation was complicated by the absence of laws relating to the reporting of sexual crimes and child abuse in the period under investigation. Some key clerical witnesses were elderly and infirm, and there were also instances in which some of the victims were reluctant to revisit the abuse they had suffered as children.