IRELAND
Irish Independent
Thursday September 06 2012
The audits of child protection practices in four dioceses and three religious orders, which were published yesterday, show that the Catholic Church still has some way to go before it fully grasps the enormity of the wrong done by priests and religious to innocent and defenceless children.
While the audits of the dioceses of Cork and Ross, Kildare and Leighlin, and Limerick were broadly positive, the same cannot be said of the diocese of Clonfert, where the current bishop, Dr John Kirby, was found to have transferred two priests against whom allegations of abuse had been made to other parishes.
Dr Kirby’s defence, that he did not know the true nature of paedophilia at the time he transferred the two priests, one in 1990 and the other in 1994, is absurd. His claim that he believed in the early 1990s that paedophilia was a case of “a friendship gone astray” is quite frankly incredible.
By the early 1990s, the full extent of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and religious was beginning to emerge. The notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth had been arrested in 1991. Delays in processing his extradition to Northern Ireland led to the collapse of the Fianna Fail/Labour coalition in November 1994.
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