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	Dublin Priests in Sex Scandal 102 Suspected of Molesting Kids, Vatican Diplomat Says By Shawn Pogatchnik The Associated Press, carried in Toronto Star [Ireland] March 9, 2006 http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout /Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1141858212381&call_pageid=968332188492 DUBLIN, Ireland—The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, rocked for a decade by sex scandals, yesterday made its biggest admission yet: 102 of its Dublin priests past and present, or 3.6 per cent of the total, are suspected of abusing children. The disclosure comes a week before the government convenes a probe into how church and state authorities conspired, by negligence and design, to cover up decades of child abuse within the Dublin priesthood. "It's very frightening for me to see that in some of these cases, so many children were abused. It's very hard to weigh that up against anything," said Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, a Vatican diplomat assigned to Dublin in 2003 to address the problem in Ireland's largest Catholic congregation. Since his appointment, the archdiocese — home to more than 1 million Catholics — has been going over the personnel records of more than 2,800 priests who have worked in Dublin since 1940. The conclusion: 102 are suspected of abusing children, 32 have been sued, and eight have been convicted of criminal offences. The archdiocese already has paid $7 million (U.S.), including $2 million in both sides' legal bills. The archdiocese, Martin said, will probably begin selling property to meet looming bills for 40 unresolved lawsuits and potential claims from hundreds more. The government probe, expected to run for at least 18 months, follows a similar inquiry into clerical abuse in the diocese of Ferns, which includes most of County Wexford and some of counties Wicklow and Carlow in the southeast. When the earlier report was published in October, it exposed a catalogue of abuse, including a priest who molested a group of First Communion girls on the altar. He was never punished. `Diarmuid Martin sticks out like sore thumb, not just in Ireland, but internationally.' Colm O'Gorman, support group leader While the church has been on the legal and moral defensive in the United States in recent years, the sense of uproar and disillusionment has been more profound in Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country that once exported priests worldwide. Here, church and state were intertwined until the 1970s — a breakup that is being accelerated by the abuse fallout. The first major scandal, in 1994, involved the government's failure to extradite a notorious pedophile priest to the neighbouring British territory of Northern Ireland. The government of the day collapsed over it. In 2001, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern apologized for state agencies' role in prolonging children's suffering and injustice and established a compensation-paying panel that exposed the taxpayer, rather than the church, to most of the bill for victims abused in orphanages, workhouses and other Catholic-run institutions. The Residential Institutions Redress Board is expected to pay out about $1.2 billion when the last of its more than 11,000 claimants is processed. But Ireland's 26 dioceses and archdioceses must face the bills for abuse claims against parish priests. So far, Martin is the only archbishop to address the scandal so directly, establishing a Child Protection Service at a cost, so far, of $3 million and publishing reports on the number of cases identified. Yesterday's report said Dublin church officials had positively identified at least 350 abuse victims and "a possible further 40 persons who may have been abused, but who it is not yet possible to identify or trace." Colm O'Gorman, who runs a support group for Irish abuse victims called One in Four — a reference to the idea that about 25 per cent of Irish people suffered sexual abuse as a child — praised Martin's approach as courageous, but also wise given his turf is about to be investigated in searing detail. "Diarmuid Martin sticks out like sore thumb, not just in Ireland, but internationally," O'Gorman said.
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