Bishop Comiskey Breaks His Silence on Ferns Scandal'church Was No Worse for Abuse Than Anywhere Else"

Irish Independent
February 1, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/bishop-comiskey-breaks-his-silence-on-ferns-scandalchurch-was-no-worse-for-abuse-than-anywhere-else-29969817.html

[with video]

Brendan Comiskey in Dublin this week and, inset, when he was installed as the Bishop of Ferns

THE disgraced former Bishop of Ferns Brendan Comiskey has broken his silence for the first time about the clerical sex abuse scandal that forced his dramatic resignation 12 years ago.

The 79-year-old, who retreated from public life following revelations that he failed to protect children from paedophile priests in his Wexford diocese, told the Irish Independent: "I did my best and it wasn't good enough and that's it."

He said he was part of the "tragic history" of the period and wasn't going to make excuses for it.

But Bishop Comiskey, a reformed alcoholic who retains the honorary title of Bishop Emeritus, claimed that an "extraordinary amount" of revelations concerning child abuse in the wider Irish society were yet to be exposed.

And he claimed that there was "no more" sexual abuse going on in the Catholic Church than among the rest of the population.

"Several surveys have proved that it was no more in the church than it was in the general population, which means that there is an extraordinary amount still to be revealed in the general population," said Bishop Comiskey when the Irish Independent approached him on a Dublin street.

Questioned about his 'disappearance' from public life, the former bishop said: "I have been here all the time ... As Colm Toibin says, 'they must be blind because I see him every day.’”

The once high-profile cleric resigned as Bishop of Ferns in 2002 in the wake of outrage sparked by the Colm O’Gorman documentary ‘Suing the Pope’, which exposed the activities of paedophile priest Fr Sean Fortune.

Bishop Comiskey agreed that the subsequent Ferns Report made shocking reading.

He revealed that he had read it “several times” but said that he did not want to “start going over it again now”.

“Yes, sure, I lived through it,” he said. But he had no desire to re-visit the past and the dramatic end to his career as one of Ireland’s leading churchmen.