So Many Questions, So Few Solutions...

Fintan O'Toole has an absolutely brilliant article about double-standards in the Irish Times this week. In it he says:

'What saddens me about the whole David Norris affair is the proof that so many distinguished, thoughtful liberal intellectuals have refused to learn the lesson that we took it on ourselves to teach the Catholic Church over recent years. We despised the church for its moral equivocation, for its culture of denial, for putting tribal loyalty ahead of ethical honesty. When we saw the agony of church people at having to give up "one of their own", we thought that "people like us" would never be like that.

We would know, surely, that you don't need moral courage to point out the failings of the other side. You need it for your own side, for people you know and like and believe in. It's precisely when friendship and loyalty are at stake that morality is tempered in the fire.'

Oh wait. That wasn't this week, and it wasn't about David Norris. That was three-and-a-half years ago, and was  about the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, whose conduct with Nepalese youths had attracted attention through the documentary Fairytale of Kathmandu, and who had been defended by several of his literary and artistic peers, with a letter from them having been lauded in the Seanad by David Norris, who publicly called for the broadcasting of the film to be postponed, pending an investigation.

I'm sorry, I'll read that again

Fintan's response to the Norris affair has been rather different. He freely admits that it's unacceptable for any member of our parliament to seek to influence the sentence of someone being tried for a serious crime, and declares inexcusable Senator Norris having done so on official headed parliamentary paper, and in his capacity as a senator, a member of our parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, and a possible future President. However, he says, this is no worse than the conduct of several other Irish politicians over the years, and as such should hardly demand a more serious penalty. Besides, he says, 

'It is quite understandable (even admirable) at a human level that he would have wished to make a plea for mercy for someone he loved... [Norris attempted to influence the Israeli High Court] out of a misguided sense of loyalty to someone who had been the love of his life... shouldn’t we feel uneasy at the notion that the gay man whose own sexuality was criminalised for so long is held to a higher standard than straight politicians? David Norris has a lot of explaining to do, but he should be allowed to do it in a free electoral debate.'

I happen to think Fintan's getting at something of value here, but still, as many of the comments on that article recognise, he's guilty here of the same double standards he so condemned in connection with those who would have defended Cathal Ó Searcaigh. And as we all know, and as Fergus Finlay admitted when talking with George Hook and John Waters on the radio the other day, if -- say -- Senator Ronan Mullen had acted in a similar fashion in connection with any priest convicted of behaving as Norris's erstwhile partner had done, then his political career would have been finished, and you'd have very few people defending him.

The Taoiseach's Speech, revisited

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, which is one of the very best things I read as an undergraduate, says that an angry man is rightly praised when he is angry at the right things, with the right people, in the right fashion, at the right time, and for the right duration. Although I believe that the Taoiseach's speech on Cloyne failed this test by being deeply wrong in how it attributed blame to the Vatican and by implication to the Pope, I do believe the anger Enda was expressing was -- in general -- absolutely justified. Indeed, much of what he said in the speech was a real call to arms, a heroic declaration of how high our standards must be if we are truly to cherish all the children of our nation. 

In this light, it's rather ironic to see Irish commentators who'd lauded the Taoiseach's speech and those who over years have espoused the sentiments Enda expressed being unabashedly dismayed that David Norris has felt obliged to withdraw from the Irish presidential race. 

I'm only singling out Fintan as I expect more of him than others; as I've noted, he's has been curiously silent in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report and the Taoiseach's speech, perhaps because he realised how much of Enda's speech was directed at the wrong target. Nonetheless, given how often he's spoken out against the Catholic Church's influence in Ireland -- sometimes justifiably, and sometimes less so -- I'm quite confident that he has wholeheartedly embraced the Taoiseach's unambiguous declarations of the primacy of the Republic over the Church, and of his determination to protect our children, 'our most precious possession of all'.

If there was a central theme to the Taoiseach's speech, it's that the time for excuses is over. If we want to protect children, then we have to have high standards and we have to abide by them, and in this light it's worth thinking -- just for a moment -- about what David Norris did. Let's leave aside the question of whether Irish politicians seeking to influence foreign courts is appropriate, or whether Senator Norris's actions were wise or foolish. Let's just focus on the central point, which is that he argued that the rapist of a fifteen-year-old boy should not be imprisoned, and test it against the high standards the Taoiseach proclaimed and the country applauded...

One could easily argue that by appealing for clemency in 1997 for a man who'd been convicted of the rape of a fifteen-year-old, and by lauding in a 2002 Magill interview the idea of older men initating teenage boys into sex, Senator Norris had displayed 'a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children'. One could fairly ask whether David Norris believes young teenagers to be children whose integrity and innocence should be safeguarded, and whether he thinks of their childhood as a sacred space we should do all we can to protect. One could further ask whether anybody who at least until recently did not hold such views should even think himself fit to be the President of a Republic of rights and responsibilities where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version of 'morality' should not be tolerated or ignored.

Perhaps most strikingly, in view of how there are no shortage of people raving about David's integrity, as though he's a martyr to basic decency and letting one's heart rule one's head, one might wonder what it is that has rendered some of Ireland’s brightest, most privileged and powerful journalists either unwilling or unable to address these questions.

Is there a right to run for the highest office in the land?

What Fintan's latest article basically says is that standards have been lower in the past than they are now, and that it's unfair to force David Norris to pay the price now for having in the past abided by those lower standards.

I see Fintan's point, though in picking his examples of Irish politicians who weren't punished for having written letters or posed Parliamentary questions in connection with criminals, he conspicuously omits the example of Trevor Sargent, who resigned as a junior minister in February 2010 in recognition of how his having contacted the Gardaí in connection with an assaulted constituent could be seen as having been unlawful. He also omits the fact that the Presidency is the highest office in the land, and thus an office with which the highest standards should be synonymous. Perhaps most troublingly, he commits the common error of making it seem as though Senator Norris had been entitled to stand for the Presidency, as though other members of the Oireachtas had a moral obligation to support his candidacy.

I appreciate that Norris has achieved a lot in all his years in the Seanad, and that he had huge popular support before the weekend, but I'd be very curious to know what his support was on Monday or Tuesday. Sure, his most ardent supporters have made their views well known, and there are certainly no shortage of them, but beyond that hard core? I'm not sure. We'd need to poll people asking not 'do you thinking David Norris should have been allowed run for the Presidency?' and not 'do you think Finian McGrath, John Halligan, and Thomas Pringle were wrong to withdraw their support for David Norris' presidential campaign?' but 'If you could, would you vote for David Norris as President of Ireland?'

The Constitution doesn't allow just anybody to run. It has clear criteria, and I've not yet seen any serious popular demand that these criteria be changed: candidates for the Presidency must be citizens of at least 35 years of age and must be nominated by at least twenty members of the Oireachtas, or by at least four County or City Councils, or by themselves, if they are a current or former President. On this basis, the absolute maximum number of people who could run in the 2011 Presidential election is twenty: eleven nominated by members of the Oireachtas, eight nominated by councils, and Mary Robinson if she nominated herself. There's no obligation on anybody to support anybody else's nomination, irrespective of how popular opinion polls say they are, if they don't like the idea of that person being President, or if they'd rather wait to see if somebody else better might come along before the deadline. Nobody's allowed to nominate more than one candidate, after all.

There's a strong case that these criteria should be changed, so that with a sufficiently large proven support base candidates could run without needing -- in effect - the approval of those people we elect to represent us at local or national level, but that's a debate for another day.


Withdrawing with grace
I've watched the video of David Norris's withdrawal speech, and have read it too, and think it's a touching piece of rhetoric. I'm still confused about why he refers to Ezra Nawi as his 'former partner of twenty five years ago' when in a 2002 interview he said their relationship only ended in 2001, but still,I'd recommend studying the speech as I think it raises some important points. Having described his former partner's rape of a fifteen-year-old as 'disgraceful', Norris said:

'I do not regret supporting and seeking clemency for a friend, but I do regret giving the impression that I did not have sufficient compassion for the victim of Ezra’s crime. I accept that more than a decade and a half later when I have now reviewed the issue, and am not emotionally involved, when I am not afraid that Ezra might take his own life, I see that I was wrong. He served his time and never offended again. Yes, his actions were terrible but my motivation to write the letter was out of love and concern. I was eager to support someone who had been very important in my life.'

I think Norris, in saying this, has effectively revealed and conceded something very valuable. Faced with the reality of someone he knew having -- let's be frank -- taken advantage of a child for his own pleasure, Senator Norris had responded with love and concern, but with love and concern that was directed wholly towards the person he knew.

This, as it happens, is how I think huge numbers of Irish people respond when they hear that people they know have been accused -- or even found guilty -- of such crimes. In their minds they rationalise the behaviour of their loved ones, they minimise the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they're still their brothers, or their sons, or their friends. This is, in fact, exactly how Denis O'Callaghan behaved in dealing with allegations of abuse in Cloyne. The Cloyne Report recognises his personal kindness but quotes him as admitting that he sometimes tended to show favour to accused priests, having been emotionally drawn to their plight, in such a way that that compromised his care for complainants.


Things to keep in mind
There are certain key things that I think we need to keep in mind in any sober discussions of child sexual abuse in Ireland. Chief among these are that the use of children by adults for sexual gratification is always wrong, that child sexual abuse is deeply damaging although different people can be damaged in different ways, that child abuse endemic in Irish life, and that the vast majority of instances of abuses are committed by people related to the abused children or by friends or neighbours of the family.

The all-pervading cancer of child abuse in Irish life is something I've referred to often in recent weeks, pointing to the SAVI Study's 2002 finding that 27 per cents of Irish adults had experienced sexual abuse in their childhood or adolescence. Vincent Browne, in today's Irish Times, goes some way to explaining what that figure means, focusing on the numbers who'd experienced contact abuse and rape:

'A report funded by government departments and published almost a decade ago, Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland, revealed that one in five women reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and a quarter of these (5.6 per cent of all girls) reported having been raped in childhood. One in six men (16.2 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and 2.7 per cent of all boys reported having been raped in childhood. We are talking here of more than 100,000 women having been raped in childhood and about 57,000 men.'

Vincent's figures aren't quite right here, though he's on the right track. The SAVI data is based on people who were adults in 2001, and so we need to look at the nearest census figures, those being the 2002 ones. In 2002, there were 1,426,681 adult males in Ireland and 1,477,491 females. Tables 4.3 of SAVI gives us a detailed breakdown on the prevalence of different types of abuse experienced by the survey respondents, with table 4.5 breaking down the respondents in terms of the most serious types of abuse they'd experienced. Focusing on the percentages, with a view to applying the SAVI figures to the general population, the essential SAVI data is as follows:

Based on the 2002 census figures, this means that ten years or so ago, there must have been about 530,000 adult survivors of contact sexual abuse in Ireland, with about 38,500 of them being men who'd been raped in childhood, and about 83,000 of them being women who'd been raped in childhood. The figure, then, for Irish adult victims of childhood rapes should be regarded as more like 120,000 than 160,000. Either way, we can all surely agree, this is an abomination.

In commenting on David Norris, Vincent Browne notes that Norris's representations to the Israel High Court showed no concern for the psychological consequences to the boy who had sex with Ezra Nawi. This matters: in saying this  Browne is effectively recognising that a young teenager cannot be said to agree in a mature and informed way to have sex with an adult, and that such sex, even if 'consensual' can prove profoundly harmful. It won't do to say it was consensual. What Brendan Wrixon, the 'Father Caden' of the Cloyne Report, got up to with the then sixteen-year-old 'Patrick' seems to have been consensual, such that the DPP couldn't have him prosecuted for sexual assault, but it's telling that he's the only cleric in the Cloyne Report to have been convicted for any offenses detailed in that report: he pleaded guilty to gross indecency.

People shouldn't be used as things, and adults shouldn't convince themselves that just because children go along with them, that they really know what they're doing. The teenagers' actions might not have been quite 'involuntary', to use Aristotle's terms again, but given their immaturity, their actions were surely, at best 'non-voluntary'. There was no true consent.

The problem is that with there being more than 780,000 adult survivors of child sexual abuse, and with about 120,000 of these having been raped in childhood, we have to face the fact that there are huge numbers of people in the country who have clearly committed some form of child sex abuse at some point.  As Fintan O'Toole said last August:

'Rapists and child abusers walk among us all the time. We sit beside them on the bus, say hello to them in the shops, share jokes with them at work. '

They're our workmates, our friends, our brothers, our neighbours, our children... and there are lots of them. Even if Vincent Browne overstated the case in April 2008 when he said that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland, the fact remains that there are far too many people out there who have abused children for our criminal justice system ever to cope with.


So what do we do?
I don't know what the answer is, because I don't believe that Denis O'Callaghan's 'pastoral approach' is the way forward either. Kindness, frankly, is not enough, and certainly won't do anything to stop the most determined and devious of abusers. However, I do think that any serious attempt to try to deal with this must aim to achieve three things, which, while not mutually exclusive, nonetheless have a certain priority to them, these being prevention, healing, and justice.


Prevention obviously is the main priority. The abuse that's been done cannot be undone, and there's little point expending most of our efforts in punishing the crimes of yesterday if we're not taking serious action to protect the children of today. Proper background checks for all those who work with children are crucial, of course, but given that most abuse happens in the family circle, that'd just be scratching the surface of the problem. We need something rather better than that. I think the key is probably the education of children, such that, for instance, children have it drummed into them time and time again that there are certain things they need to tell parents or other responsible adults.

In a heavy-handed way I'm talking about a type of sex education, but in the main I'm thinking of something more subtle -- even something more natural. Take, for example, how parents might read books to their children, and how the most popular of which in recent years would surely be the Harry Potter series. The basic plot of each book involves something bad happening and then the children deciding not to tell the adults responsible for them, convinced as they are that they'd not be believed. Plotwise, this is absolutely necessary, and it works from the viewpoint of the characters' development too, but it's not good practice for children. So whenever parents watch films or read books with their children, they should watch out for stuff like this, and talk to their children, and get them to understand that Harry and Hermione and Ron were wrong, and that there was no guarantee that things would have worked out as they did...


Healing, then, is the next stage. Again, leaving aside the fact that most reported cases of abuse don't lead to a conviction, I don't see the point in putting most of our energy into punishing people while hundreds of thousands of abuse victims are to suffer in silence. We need to find a way to help abuse survivors heal, as best they can. I reckon that'd take a huge amount of work, using counselling groups, state-funded therapy, reconciliation tribunals to allow survivors to confront their abusers, forums where people can just talk about this, religious organisations and ministries and services, and just encouraging people to open up and to listen... whatever it takes. In his homily on Reek Sunday, Archbishop Neary said:

'A woman asked me last week when it would all end. The honest answer is that it will not end until every survivor has told their story and until every victim is facilitated in embarking on their journey to real healing, where true dignity is accorded.'

He's right. There are probably few things Irish people are better at than telling stories, and yet for many of us we can't tell stories that almost define who we are. We keep those stories in the dark, trapped within us. We talk a lot, and say very little. We need to find a way to change that.


Finally, there's Justice. For some people justice will be necessary to the healing process; in other cases, it'll be necessary for the protection of other children. But given that there are only about 4,500 prison places in all of Ireland, and that there may well be more than twenty times that number of people in the country who have abused children at some point, I think we have to accept that much though many of us might wish it, we can't hurl them all into prison. Clearly there are a small number of monsters out there, multiple abusers who've ruined countless lives; whatever may have caused them to become what they are, I don't think there are many who'd argue against them facing the harshest of prison sentences.

But what of the rest, and keeping in mind how difficult it can be to prove abuse has happened, especially if it happened a long time ago?

If it's true, as I've read, that a third of all abusers are adolescents, and that adolescents are more susceptible to therapy than established abusers -- their sexuality, such as it is, still not being fully formed in many cases -- then I think there's hope that they can themselves be healed. Indeed, given the statistics, I think it's very likely that many adolescent abusers were themselves child victims only a few years before they committed their own crimes. That's not to say that abuse is contagious, such that abuse victims regularly become abusers -- that's a gross and calumnious oversimplification -- just that given the huge prevalence of abuse in Ireland, a significant overlap between the two categories must be inevitable.

In between these extremes, I really don't know, save that each case must be dealt with on its own merits. I think there are distinctions between different types of abuse, but I'm also fully aware that what, say might be embarrassing but basically harmless for one child could be utterly devastating for another. I also think that there are distinctions between an adult stupidly becoming infatuated and getting involved in a relationship with a single adolescent and one who deliberately seeks out and grooms children of whatever age so that he can prey on them. Again, even recognising that all of this is wrong, I think we have to draw distinctions. Flattening it out so that everything is equally monstrous, equally unforgiveable -- that'll get us nowhere. We can't throw half the country into prison.

I'd also add that I don't believe it helps things to scream at people for not doing enough to prevent abuse. Sure, there are some people in positions of authority who do nothing whatsoever or even effectively facilitate abuse, but there are times when I'm not sure it's possible to do enough. The more I've learned and thought about it, the more I've become convinced that abuse is a miasma, a pollution that contaminates all those who come in contact with it. What do you do if you learn that a fifty-year-old man, married and with children of his own, had abused his cousin thirty-five years earlier? What he did back then may have been monstrous, and may have done horrendous damage to that cousin, but in the years since then he may have had help and he may have changed...

Because there's the dilemma. What if that man is abusing his children even now, and you have the power to stop it? Are you in some sense responsible if you don't act? But what if he did terrible things decades ago, but stopped, and grew into a decent adult, and is a good husband and a good father? Because then the prosecution of him wouldn't just punish him for his crimes -- it'd punish his wife and his children too. Situations like that must exist all over the land. There must be thousands of cases like that. I think we need some kind of mechanism to enable people to bring forward serious concerns based on real experience -- not just 'soft information' -- without necessarily setting in motion courses of action that could shatter more lives.


Anyway, that's all I've got. Ten posts I've done on this now, some huge and all labelled 'Abuse and Cloyne'. Time, I think, to focus on cheerier topics for a while.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

Ireland Through A Glass, Darkly

I'm a huge fan of The West Wing, and have watched it so often that I tend to recognise lines from the show being echoed -- Jason O'Mahony, for instance, in the context of a sensible and concise discussion of the death penalty, seems to be channelling a very good point about drug barons that Leo McGarry -- as distinct from Patsy McGarry -- makes in the third episode of the show:

'Oh, then you are just as stupid as these guys who think capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day to day lives under the possibility of execution, and their executions are a lot less dainty than ours and tend to take place without the bother and expense of due process.'

In writing about Cloyne, David Norris, and sex abuse in general I've thought often of 'Two Cathedrals', the spectacular finale to the show's second season, which is structured around the funeral of President Bartlet's executive secretary and very old friend Delores Landingham. In a series of flashbacks, Bartlet remembers her trying to persuade him of the injustice of women in the school he attended -- and where his father was principal -- being paid less than the men.

'Numbers, Mrs Landingham,' he says, 'If you want to convince me of something, show me numbers.'

In the aftermath of her funeral, wrestling with the storms that surround him, he imagines her with him -- or he's haunted by her ghost, but let's run with the former -- as he wonders what to do.

'God doesn't make cars crash and you know it,' Mrs Landingham says. 'Stop using me as an excuse.'
'The Party's not going to want me to run,' insists Bartlet.
'The Party'll come back. You'll get them back.'
'I've got a secret for you, Mrs. Landingham, I've never been the most popular man in the Democratic Party.'
'I've got a secret for you, Mr. President. Your father was a prick who could never get over the fact that he wasn't as smart as his brothers. Are you in a tough spot? Yes. Do I feel sorry for you? I do not. Because there are people way worse off than you.'
'Give me numbers,' he says.
'I don't know numbers. You give them to me.'
'How about a child born this minute has one in five chances of being born into poverty?'
'How many Americans don't have health insurance?'
'44 million.'
'What's the number one cause of death for black men under 35?'
'Homicide.'
'How many Americans are behind bars?'
'Three million.'
'How many Americans are drug addicts?'
'Five million.'
'And one in five kids in poverty?'
'That's thirteen million American children. 3.5 million kids go to schools that are literally falling apart. We need 127 billion in school construction, and we need it today!'
'To say nothing of 53 people trapped in an embassy,' adds Mrs Landingham.
'Yes.'
'You know, if you don't want to run again, I respect that,' says Mrs Landingham, getting to her feet, 'But if you don't run 'cause you think it's gonna be too hard or you think you're gonna lose - well, God, Jed, I don't even want to know you.'

So what's this got to do with sex abuse in Ireland?

As a country, and despite all the newspaper headlines, we simply haven't got to grips with the reality of child sex abuse. We've got some understanding of how damaging it is, because we've heard the heartbreaking stories of deeply brave people like Marie Collins and Andrew Madden, but we have no concept, collectively, of how prevalent it is, of how many people have experienced it, of how many people have committed it, of how many people know about it, of how rarely its perpetrators have faced justice, or of who the perpetrators actually are.

When it comes to child abuse in Ireland, most people haven't a clue. The problem, when we get down to it, isn't primarily within the Irish Church; it's within the Irish people. Truth be told, until very recently I don't think distinctions between the two are meaningful: given the huge numbers of twentieth-century Irish families with priests, brothers, or nuns in their ranks, I don't think we can speak of the twentieth-century Irish Church as though it was somehow discrete from the twentieth-century Irish Nation. I don't think we should discuss the abuse of thousands of children by Irish priests as though it's somehow a different phenomenon from the abuse of hundreds of thousands of children by other Irish people, and I don't think we can discuss the Irish Church's historical lack of will in taking action against child abuse as though it's somehow different from the Irish Nation's historical lack of will in taking action against child abuse.

And yes, I'm fully aware that not everybody in independent Ireland was Catholic, but insofar as the overwhelming majority were, I think we have to face the fact that the Church wasn't separate from society so much as it was a facet of Irish society, and one that reflected wider society, with all its vices and virtues. I've wondered about this kind of stuff many a time in the past, and friends have responded with disbelief, saying that while they realised that most Irish sexual abuse happened within the home, it was surely obvious that priests abused far more than other people. And then I raise the figures from the 2002 SAVI Study, and they look very doubtful.

The good, the bad and the ugly: Media coverage of scandals in the Catholic Church in Ireland.

There's a very pertinent article by one Michael Breen in the Winter 2000 issue of the Irish Jesuits' journal Studies. Breen was then a priest and head of the Department of Communications and Media Studies at Limerick's Mary Immaculate College, where he is now Dean of Arts. In this article he argues that:

'As well as setting the agenda for public issues, the news media can also set the agenda for themselves by their repetitious coverage of a single event and their definitions of newsworthiness. People, including journalists, cannot pay attention to everything; they are selective. They take shortcuts by relying on the most accessible information sources. Frequent repetition of a given story at a national level focuses journalistic attention on that issue. The framing of a news story, therefore, is of critical importance in terms of the ultimate impact of a story.'

Breen recognises that the Church should be grateful to the media for it having exposed the horror of child abuse within the Church, thereby forcing the Church to deal with the issue. However, he also notes the anger of those who feel that the media in Ireland had created a narrative which convey the impression that the primary perpetrators of child sex abuse in Ireland are Catholic clergy. For example, with reference to the Irish Times, which certainly would not be the worst offender in this regard, Breen claims that between August 1993 and August 2000 -- at which point, presumably, he wrote the article -- the term 'paedophile priest' was used 332 times. In contrast, he says, the term 'paedophile farmer' was used just five times, and such terms as 'paedophile parent', 'paedophile teacher', and 'paedophile journalist' weren't used at all.

Central to Breen's argument is the idea that the general media failure to alert people to the fact that the vast majority of child sex abuse occurs within the home does child protection a grave disservice, and that this is exacerbated by 'a media concentration on clerical abusers to the virtual exclusion of most others'.

How bad was the situation ten years ago?

I first came across Breen's article when reading the 2002 SAVI Study, which alludes to the article once or twice. The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland Study, which I've mentioned a few times in recent weeks, was a huge survey, conducted in 2001 by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. More than 3,000 people were interviewed in depth about a range of related issues such as whether they'd ever been a victim of sexual abuse or violence, the nature of that abuse or violence, the relationship they'd had with those who had abused or assaulted them, whether or not they'd ever disclosed their experiences before, and whether their experiences had been dealt with through the courts. The survey had a high response rate, and should be regarded as authoritative; to put it into context, in contrast to the more than 3,000 people interviewed for the SAVI Study, a typical political poll in Ireland is based on a sample of 1,000 people.

The Study, of course, dealt with both the abuse of children and of adults, but given that we're talking about child sex abuse now, the key findings are -- more or less -- as follows:

• Roughly 27 per cent Irish adults in 2001 had been the victims of child sexual abuse. Given that the adult population in the following year's census was 2,904,172, this means that there must have been something of the order of 780,000 adults survivors of child sexual abuse walking around Ireland.
• Just under 65 per cent of child abuse victims had been abused whilst under the age of twelve.
• Over 48 per cent of abuse survivors had never disclosed their experiences to anyone before being surveyed.
• Just under 52 per cent of abuse survivors surveyed had previously told family, friends, or others of their experiences.
• Only about 5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point been reported to the Gardaí.
• Just 16 per cent of 38 abuse cases reported to Gardaí had gone to court; of these six cases, only four had resulted in a verdict of guilt.
• In other words, little more than 10 per cent of reported abuse cases had by 2001 led to a criminal conviction.
• More broadly, only about 0.5 per cent of abuse cases had at that point led to a criminal conviction.

I said 'more or less' there because it's sometimes difficult to make the figures add up. I'm not sure why, but it seems that not everybody surveyed answered every question. Still, let's stay with that figure of 780,000 adult abuse survivors. I think we'd have to agree that that's abominable: it means that more than one in four Irish adults suffered sexual abuse when in their childhood or adolescence.

Now, one question we need to consider, if we want seriously to engage with Breen's argument that the media's excessive emphasis on clerical abuse is both misleading and dangerous, is the issue of how many victims of sexual abuse in Ireland were victims of people who they knew as priests.

Tables 4.10 and 4.11 of the Report give us the most important data in this regard, though, as I've said, the overall numbers don't quite add up, in that these tables seem to refer to just 722 people, whereas it seems that 844 people who responded to the survey said that they'd experienced child sexual abuse. So, combining the data from the two tables into one table, here are the facts as they stood in 2001, when the Study was conducted.

It seems, then, that in 2001, out of a sample of 722 self-identifying abuse survivors, 12 said that they'd been sexually abused in childhood by people they knew to be priests. Of course, it's possible that some of the 'strangers' were priests too, but given that it seems that clerical abusers abused their positions in society in order to gain access to children who they harmed, it seems unlikely that they'd have hidden the fact of their priesthood. That would have been their best way of ensuring their crimes were kept secret.

So, 12 out 722 seems to be the real figure for clerical abuse in Ireland, that being just under 1.7 per cent, and from a time when there were no specific child protection measures anywhere in Ireland, when there were far more priests than there are now, and when priests had a social status and an access to children that they haven't had in a very long time.

Are things really different now?

I think they are. Unfortunately, the State hasn't done a second SAVI study, but given how the findings of the first one seem to have had no impact on the national consciousness or official policy -- Vincent Browne, in a May 2010 Irish Times article, referred to it as 'the seminal but largely ignored report, Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland' -- I'm not wholly convinced that there'd be any point in doing more work in this precise area.

(Browne, it should be pointed out, has probably pointed to the Study more often than any other figure in Irish public life, and it was presumably in connection with this that he claimed in April 2008 that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland. I don't think anybody was listening.)

Having said that, it rather looks as though it's not merely that 'most child sexual abuse happens in the home' so much as that 'almost all child sexual abuse happens in the home.' Maeve Lewis, on taking the helm at One in Four back in 2008, said that her organisation would be attempting to tackle sexual abuse in familes, saying that 'the most dangerous place for children is in the extended family,' but I'm not sure what they're doing about it. The Irish Times ran an article in February 2009 in which one Mick Moran, a Garda Detective Sergeant working with Interpol in fighting internet paedophiles, said that 85 per cent of child sexual abuse takes place in the family home or in the family circle. Perhaps even more horrifyingly, in November 2009 the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97 per cent of those who had been sexually abused as children and who had sought the help of Irish rape crisis centres in 2008 had been abused either by a family member or a friend of the family. What's more, a 2003 conference of the Irish Association of Care Workers was told that a third of all sexual abuse in Ireland was committed by adolescents, and indeed, there seems to be a fair amount of scholarly literature out there on the phenomenon of sexual abuse by adolescents.

This doesn't seem to be the impression the media gives...

I think most reasonable people will readily concede that most abuse happens within the home, and that the reporting of clerical child sex abuse is somewhat disproportionate, but will think that it's not wildly so. The thing is, I don't think the numbers bear this out.

For starters, how many people in Ireland have even heard of the SAVI Study? There was an excellent comment the other day which asked what the reaction to the SAVI Report had been, considering the reaction to the Cloyne Report, and this got me thinking, because I couldn't remember any reaction at all. I'm not even sure when I first heard of it, but  I think it was in passing about two or three years ago.

So, I went to the Irish Times website, and started trawling through its archives as best can be done without access to them, using its 'search' function to see how many articles and letters since April 2002 had mentioned the SAVI Study. I searched for 'SAVI' and for 'Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland', and looked at each partial result as best I could, and in the end came to the conclusion that between April 2002 and the other evening, the SAVI Study had been mentioned in total 63 times over the last nine years, often in connection with the rape of adults rather than the abuse of children. The most recent piece mentioning it was a letter on 13 June. To put this into context, I'd challenge you to find out how many articles or letters have featured the word 'Cloyne' in the last month alone. At least according to the Irish Times' own search facility, it comes to 163 pieces.

That's 163 articles or letters in just one month in connection with a report which told us that two people who had been in positions of authority didn't follow their own guidelines, as compared to scarcely more than 60 references over more than nine years to an report that told us that more than 750,000 Irish adults were sexually abused as children. Is it any wonder that people don't know about the SAVI Study?

And I very much doubt that the Irish Times is the worst offender in this regard; it certainly won't have been the most sensationalist, but given how good a paper it is in other respects, I think it should be better than this. The media may not decisively influence what we think, admittedly, but it surely has a huge influence on what we think about.

Breen's Figures, Updated: Or, how do the numbers stack up now?

The SAVI figures showed that for every victim of clerical child sex abuse, there were sixty victims of child sex abuse by people other than priests. The hints at modern figures I've been able to glimpse in statements from the likes of the RCNI and Mick Moran suggest that nowadays the gap is even more stark.

This makes sense:  we're very careful about strangers and people outside our own families and close friends, and we're especially so around  Catholic priests; indeed most priests are themselves scrupulously careful around children; however inadequate or however imperfectly followed they may be, churches, schools, health authorities, sports clubs, scouting organisations and so forth all tend to have child-protection policies, and indeed to have designated people to look out for children's safety.

Unfortunately, these realities don't seem to be reflected in the media. Again, wholly relying on the Irish Times' search facility, and without access to its full archive and without time to do the serious work even if I had access, what can we say about how the Irish Times has reported on child abuse since Michael Breen commented on how things stood up to August 2000? Well, bearing in mind that this isn't as systematic an analysis as I would like to do, and hoping that a proper media student will do the real legwork at some point...

• The word 'paedophile' seems to have appeared in 1,320 articles or letters since September 2000. In 295 of those pieces, the term 'paedophile priest' was used; putting it another way, despite the fact that just 1.7 per cent of survivors of child sex abuse in Ireland were abused by priests, 22.3 per cent of all  Irish Times pieces mentioning paedophiles use the term 'paedophile priests'.
• Compared to the 295 uses of the term 'paedophile priest', the term 'paedophile teacher' has been used three times in the Irish Times since September 2000, while the term 'paedophile journalist' has not been used once.
• The phrase 'sex abuse' has been used in 2,295 pieces, but in 1,056 of these pieces, it appears as part of either the phrase 'clerical sex abuse' or 'clerical child sex abuse', such that 46 per cent of all Irish Times articles on sex abuse appear to explicitly link it with the clergy.
• A search for 'child sex abuse' brings up 1,190 results, but of these pieces, 579 use the phrase 'clerical child sex abuse', such that 48.7 per cent of all Irish Times articles on child sex abuse appear to explicitly link it with clergy.
• Of the last hundred articles to use the phrase 'child sex abuse', in 61 cases the phrase 'child sex abuse' was preceded by the word 'clerical', and a further 28 cases used the phrase in connection with the Catholic clergy, such that 89 per cent of the Irish Times' most recent articles or letters mentioning child sex abuse did so in relation to the Catholic Church.

Again, I'm not claiming that these are formal figures; they're ballpark ones, based on simple searches of the Irish Times' own electronic archive. You can and should check them yourselves. A real researcher could do important and substantial work on this. Still, even as a crude survey, I think they give a pretty strong indication that Ireland's newspaper of record has played no small part in fostering a popular belief that the institutional Church is a singularly malign force in Irish life.

By doing so, it bears an enormous responsibility for having distracted the Irish people away from the horrific reality that the overwhelming majority of child sex abuse happens with the family circle, being committed by family members, neighbours, and friends. In this it's not alone, and I believe the Irish media in general is effectively endangering Irish children even now, facilitating their abuse by diverting attention from the fact that it's happening. The prevailing narrative that the Irish media has pushed for years, concentrating on elderly clerical abusers and largely ignoring the far greater dangers in the Irish home, diverts attention from the fact that huge numbers of Irish children are being sexually abused across the land every day, and they are not being abused by priests.

So what's going on?

In an Irish Times article in June 2006, Breda O'Brien quoted Hannah McGee, Chair of the Department of Psychology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and one of the original authors of the SAVI study, as saying that 'We like our scapegoats, we like our simple stories.' 

The problem, basically, is that it would be easier for us all if we could single out clearly-identifiable groups in our society as being  responsible for most sexual abuse. Unfortunately, the horrendous reality is that we can't. That's like cursing one tree when we're standing in a forest. Child sexual abuse has been -- and may still be -- endemic in Irish life, such that, as the article says 'it is so pervasive as to be almost beyond comprehension'.

We have to figure out a way of dealing with this. Scapegoating priests and pointing fingers at other people isn't the answer. I'm not sure what is, but it's certainly not that.

David Norris, or Ireland in the Looking Glass

As it seems most people reading the blog nowadays are coming here in connection with what I've written on Cloyne, I've decided to give my Cloyne pieces their own label -- at seven so far, and this being an eighth one, I think that makes sense.

Obviously, the big news at home is the effective collapse of David Norris's campaign for the Presidency. Despite where the increasingly-polarised nature of Ireland's internal conversation nowadays, I really don't think anybody should be celebrating this, not least because an awful lot of people had invested an awful lot of hope in his candidacy, and hope is something Ireland really needs at the moment. For all that, though, I think it's worth thinking about -- carefully, honestly, and charitably -- if we are serious about holding up a mirror to ourselves as a nation, which is something I firmly believe we need to do.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not going to pretend that I've ever liked Norris, or that I planned on voting for him, or that I thought he'd be a fine President. While I admired his courage in fighting for the decriminalisation of homosexuality back in the day, I've mainly just found him annoying, and have been invariably exasperated whenever he's been on any panel discussions on the telly, interrupting everyone else and braying loudly so nobody else could be heard. To be fair, these public-house antics are all too common on Irish television, but Norris has always struck me as one of the worst offenders. At home earlier in the year, the Brother pointed out that if I really felt that way I should probably be campaigning for Norris, as President Norris would probably be far less prominent a presence on the television than Senator Norris has been, and I had to concede he had a point. And I've said this before.

An Imploding Campaign

So what's happened? Well, as we all know, a couple of months ago a story broke about how there'd been a Magill article back in 2002 in which Senator Norris, in the course of being interviewed by the restaurant critic Helen Lucy Burke, warbled at great length about the practice of pederasty in ancient Greece, saying that there was a lot of nonsense talked about paedophilia, that the key issue was consent and not age, and that there was something to be said for the practice of older men introducing male youths to 'sexual realities'; he mused that he might have relished the prospect of such an initiation in his youth.

The surfacing of this old article set off a storm of protest, with people inferring that this was an attempt to smear the Senator through an unvoiced insinuation that gay people pose a threat to the young. Norris himself insisted that the quotes had been taken out of context -- which is always a problem -- and that he was being misrepresented with his campaign being deliberately sabotaged, but John Waters, who'd been Magill's Consulting Editor in 2002 held that he'd given Norris every opportunity at the time to clarify or retract his statements before they went to print.

Well, the story lapsed, but then over the weekend the Norris campaign basically fell apart with several key staff resigning, all in connection with the emergence of two letters, written in January and August 1997, pleading that the Israeli High Court should have mercy on Ezra Yizhak Nawi, a friend and former partner of his, who'd been convicted -- having pleaded guilty -- of having had sex in 1992 with a 15-year-old boy. One of the letters was written on official Seanad paper, and both were written in Norris' capacity as a Senator and a member of the Irish Foreign Affairs Committee. The story seems to have been sparked by a blogger who'd pulled together various bits and bobs from the internet, doing the kind of work Irish journalists probably should have been doing all along. Because whatever about that blogger's agenda, this stuff does matter: the President is our first citizen, and should be someone in whose judgement and character we have confidence.

A Question of Motive

I really don't know how this is going to play out, save that his Presidential campaign, no matter what he may think, is surely dead in the water. I listened yesterday to an interesting discussion on the topic on the radio, and though I agreed almost entirely with John Waters, I took issue with one thing he said. Waters made the point that the Burke interview took place five years after the Yizhak trial, and that he believed that Norris was trying to prepare the ground for when the story eventually broke. I don't believe that. I can think of three ways of explaining why Norris said what he did, and Waters' explanation strikes me as the least credible.

The first is that Norris may actually have believed what he said, and that this was why he was so willing to defend his friend, despite knowing that his friend had indeed admitted the statutory rape of a teenage boy. Norris may well have written his letters in the sincere belief that the boy's consent mattered more than his youth. I don't think David Norris is a devious man. This strikes me as plausible.

The second is that Norris may have defended his friend without full comprehension of what his friend had done, and had then rationalised away his friend's actions and his own support of him by convincing himself that what had happened was not merely harmless, but the sort of the thing that might even have been beneficial to the youth. That he thought this way strikes me as at least equally plausible, given that people have an extraordinary capacity to lie to themselves. I'll always remember an old psychology lecturer of mine saying that 'Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising one.' 

I don't believe Norris was cynically plotting a 2004 or 2011 election campaign back in 2002 -- though he does allude to his possible future candidacy in the longer letter -- such that he was trying to change the attitudes of the country so that nobody would bat an eyelid when they found how he'd begged the Israeli High Court to show leniency to a man who'd pleaded guilty to something that any Irish court would have recognised as statutory rape. That'd have been an absurd ambition, and one characterised by a cynicism that I've never heard anyone ascribe to the man. No, I don't think he was trying to convince the country. He may have been trying to convince himself.

What's that got to do with the price of (loaves and) fish?

So, what does all this have to do with us as a nation, and Cloyne as a recent phenomenon? There's no way that these developments can be discussed other than in the context of the last two weeks of heated debate, and it is striking that today's edition of the Irish Times is the first edition of the paper in some time not even to feature the word 'Cloyne', although the revelations of the Cloyne Report are clearly the subject, in part, of Archbishop Neary's Reek Sunday homily.

It's worth looking at the main letter in depth. Take, for example, this passage, wrapping things up:

'Tenthly non custodial sentences are routinely considered where the offender seeks treatment or counselling. In this case Mr Yizhak has been under the care of a psychotherapist and wishes to continue with this treatment. [...] Secure in the knowledge that Mr. Yizhak will not offend again in the same way, that he is prepared to make financial compensation available to the young man involved, that lasting and perhaps permanent damage will be done to his psychological and material welfare by being imprisoned, by view of the fact that there is a possibility that he may attempt suicide in prison, [...] I earnestly beg that the court may see the possibility of securing justice not by sending him to prison but by imposing a non-custodial sentence.'

I don't see how Senator Norris could have been 'secure in the knowledge' that his former partner would not offend again the same way, but I think what's clear here is that Norris is determined to make the case that his friend is no longer a danger to anyone, is actively try to best his worse nature, will attempt to remedy whatever harm he's done, and that no good could be achieved through his imprisonment.

Now, we all know that the political career of, say, Ronan Mullen would be finished if he had written such a letter in defence of, say, Brendan Wrixon, the 'Father Caden' of the Cloyne Report and the only priest featured in that Report to have been been convicted in the courts of the land. There'd certainly not be a discussion of whether it was still plausible for him to continue in his Presidential campaign, were he engaged in such a thing. That'd be the end of him. And indeed, I think that would be absolutely right and proper. Frankly, I believe that what David Norris did was wrong, and I believe that he should end his Presidential campaign now, and should give serious thought to resigning his seat in the Seanad.

'We Must Love One Another Or Die'

However, I really don't think people should be screaming to demand this. Those in Ireland who've spoken out in recent weeks against the Government's blustering attacks on the Vatican have received vicious personal abuse for pointing out that while anger at the revelations in the Cloyne Report is fully justified, anger at the wrong people and the wrong institutions was not. The last couple of weeks have seen too much heat in this debate, and not nearly enough light.

Some good may yet come of the Norris affair. One thing that should be clear is that David Norris, in begging a foreign court to have mercy on his friend, was motivated not by a callous contempt for Ezra Yizhak Nawi's adolescent victim, but by love for his friend, respect for the good his friend had done and was capable of, hope that his friend could change, trust that the help his friend was receiving could heal him, and concern that a prison sentence might destroy someone who regarded as basically being a good man.

It's easy to sneer at the naivety and misdirected kindness of David Norris, just as it is that of Denis O'Callaghan, but I think Ireland's not short of people who would take their approach, put in their situations.

Vincent Browne argued in the Irish Times back in April 2008 that there are 'literally hundreds of thousands of paedophiles at loose' in Ireland, and though I suspect his figures are overstated, I think he approaches an important point. If it's true, as has been reported, that one third of all child sex abuse in Ireland has been committed by adolescents, with almost all sexual abuse that's reported nowadays having been committed by family members or friends, then we start to get at part of the problem. In June 2006 a group of NGOs dealing with child sex abuse claimed that fewer than three in every thousand cases of sexual abuse in Ireland ever lead to a criminal prosecution. The fact is that most Irish abuse survivors either never tell anybody what happened to them, or only ever tell family or friends. They don't want to take their siblings or cousins or parents to court. They don't want to take the husbands or wives or parents or children of family friends to court. They try to deal with it themselves and to keep things behind closed doors. They try to avoid hurting people they love.

Irish society does its damnedest to cover up the scourge of abuse in our country, but in most cases, I don't think it does this through malice or a cynical desire for self-preservation. I think that most people, on hearing of abuse -- especially abuse that happened long ago -- hope the problems have already been sorted out or will be sorted out, continue to trust people they've always trust, and hope that harm can be undone, sickness can be healed, and wickedness can be reformed. But of course, when we're wrong we allow abusers to continue in their wickedness, and doing so we allow them to continue ruining lives. 

Mercy, hope, forgiveness, and love -- the very best qualities we have -- can actually facilitate further harm.

There's no point shouting about this, let alone gloating. We need to tread very carefully. Our country has been broken for a long time, and we need to face the truth of this, and then start trying to figure out how we can tackle it. Anger won't heal us.

The Cloyne Report: Tackling Prevailing Myths

Part Seven in an Occasional Series
I've found the Irish Times' coverage of the Cloyne Report fascinating, not least because despite the editorial line lauding the Taoiseach's speech to a near-empty Dáil, the paper in general hasn't skimped on articles taking issue with the Government's reaction.

The political correspondent Deaglán de Bréadún has noted that the Government's blustering has been very useful in distracting the people and the papers from its own shortcomings, a view that's shared by an otherwise unemployed columnist; Ian Elliott has pointed out that it was the Church and not the State that uncovered the problems with Magee and O'Callaghan in Cloyne; Breda O'Brien has observed that the State's own child safety failures are even now a cause for serious concern, and has wondered whether we as a nation are genuinely interested in protecting our children; social workers have been reported as arguing that mandatory reporting of abuse could do more harm than good; Gerry Whyte has argued that the seal of the Confessional is already protected under Irish law, and may well be protected under the Constitution; Paddy Agnew has explained that it's wrong to think of the Vatican as a single-minded entity bent on protecting itself no matter what; Vincent Twomey has taken issue with the Taoiseach having defamed the Pope and the Vatican and has, along with Breda O'Brien and John Waters, contested Enda's false claims about the Vatican having supposedly intervened in Irish affairs and attempted to obstruct the Murphy Commission's investigation into Cloyne.

That's not to say that any of these dispute in any respect the findings of the Commission, or that they don't deplore how Magee and O'Callaghan mishandled affairs in Cloyne. Nor is it to say in any way that they deny the horrific reality of such abuse of children as happened in Cloyne or the devastating effects of that abuse. It's merely to say that these people have a grasp on the facts and appear to have actually read the Report for themselves, rather than relying on what other people have said about it. It's well worth reading the Report, because it is being misrepresented. Here's a letter, for instance, from Wednesday's Irish Times, which I think may be the best of the week:

'As a practising Catholic and member of the Fine Gael party, I was inspired by Mr Kenny’s Dáil speech to read the Cloyne report for myself. It soon became embarrassingly clear that Mr Kenny had not done so, and I fear he will come to regret some of his vitriol.

It is my earnest hope that, when the Vatican issues its response to the Government, Mr Kenny takes some time to study it and to respond in a manner befitting An Taoiseach.

The hour requires a statesman, not an opportunist demagogue.'

And indeed, while the papers' letters in the immediate aftermath of the Taoiseach's rant were overwhelmingly in favour of his posturing, day by day it's become clear that people are starting to realise that while we have serious problems with child abuse in Ireland, Enda's opportunistic grandstanding isn't part of the solution. I wonder if this is why Fintan O'Toole, the most gifted, intelligent, and perceptive of the Church's opponents at home has been keeping his mouth shut on this; he's probably smart enough and honest enough to realise that Enda's witterings are neither honest nor helpful.

But I wanted to talk about a piece in Thursday's Irish Times entitled 'Why is Vatican so miffed at reaction to Cloyne report?' which sneers at the Vatican's astonished reaction to how the Irish establishment has responded to the Cloyne Report. This piece seems to have gone down a storm on Twitter, even among people I respect, and indeed there are letters raving about it in today's Irish Times. One correspondent goes so far as to say that a copy of the article should be posted on every fridge in Ireland lest we forget the fine detail. As ever, though, the piece is almost complete fiction. The Questions and Answers format I used for talking about Cloyne the other day seems to have been helpful, so I'll try it again here.


1. Is Rome 'miffed' at 'excessive reactions' to the Murphy Report?
It seems to be. On Monday the vice-director of the Vatican's Press Office, Father Ciro Benedettini, said, among other things, that 'The recalling of the Nuncio, a measure rarely used by the Holy See, denotes the seriousness of the situation, and the desire of the Holy See to deal with it objectivity and with determination, as well as a certain note of surprise and regret regarding some excessive reactions.'

2. What reactions does the Vatican think were excessive?
Well, in the immediate aftermath of the Report, certain prominent Irish politicians talked of rendering illegal in Irish law the Catholic seal of Confession, and in his speech to the Dail last week, the Taoiseach attacked the Vatican for what happened in Cloyne.

3. Wasn't he right to do so?
No, we've been through this. If anything, the problem at Cloyne seems not to have been a slavish obedience to Rome so much as it was an arrogant determination to ignore the opinions of anybody outside County Cork.

4. So how does Patsy McGarry, the author of this article, respond to the 'surprise and regret' the Vatican had expressed?
Well, by an impressively unrelated series of non-sequiturs, in the main, starting with the claim that the Irish State has had to spend €133.8 million over the last few years unearthing what he said was available to Rome all along.

5. And has it?
No. For starters, almost all of that money -- more than €126 million -- was spent on the Ryan Report into abuse in Ireland's industrial schools. These schools, though run by religious orders, were supervised by the Irish State, not by Rome, such that the Report is utterly scathing about the religious orders themselves and the State's historical failure to supervise and inspect schools and institutions for which it was responsible. It in no way even hints that Rome is in any way to blame.

Indeed, as far as I can see through searching through all five volumes of the Ryan Report, the word 'Vatican' is only used seven times, almost invariably in connection with changes necessitated by the Second Vatican Council.  The Report doesn't record that it even bothered to ask the Vatican if it had any information on the subject, as it was obvious that the Vatican lacked this information.

6. I see. So there's no truth in this?
Not if we're using 'Rome' as a synonym for 'Vatican', no. It is true that the Christian Brothers' and the Rosminians' head offices are in Rome, and that there were lots of files there, but aside from these files not being comprehensive, there's no suggestion in the Report that these files were ever handled by the Vatican, despite such religious orders being notionally answerable to the Secretariat of State for the Religious. Look at the Report's conclusions -- it doesn't even vaguely criticise the Vatican, whereas it's pretty damning of the State.

Shall I go on?

7. Please do. What about the Ferns, Murphy, and Cloyne Reports? Did Rome have all the information on them, information that the State had to pay maybe €8 million to rustle up?
I very much doubt it. After all, we know from the Cloyne report that despite there being concerns raised or complaints made about eighteen priests in Cloyne between 1996 and 2009, the Diocese only ever contacted Rome about four of these, in three cases not doing so until 2009. Of the forty-six cases the Murphy Commission considered in Dublin between 1975 and 2004, the Report describes only four as having ever been passed on to Rome. In short, two offical reports based on all the documentation clearly show that Rome did not have all the information on these matters.

8. Right, so the two opening paragraphs are almost wholly fictitious. What of the third one, where he says files on five Ferns priests mysteriously turned up in 2005, when the draft Ferns report was already complete?
This certainly happened, as it seems that the solicitors who'd been hired to find all the files for the Ferns Commission had missed out on a few files that might have been of relevance. In connection with this, the Ferns Commission accepted in an Appendix to the Ferns Report 'that the omission of the documents identified in the course of this further investigation was due to a regrettable error on the part of the Diocese and did not constitute the withholding of cooperation on its part. The Inquiry is satisfied that the cases cited below do not impact on the work done by the Inquiry or on the conclusions or recommendations reached by it.'

9. So, although this did happen, the Commission accepted that this was a genuine error and that it didn't hamper the investigation in any way. Right. So why the sneering at the Pope having declined Bishop Eamon Walsh's 2009 resignation as an auxiliary bishop of Dublin?
I have no idea. The implication is that the Ferns Commission shouldn't have accepted that the belated production of some documents was a genuine error, and was wrong to say that the delayed documents wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever to the Report's findings, something that itself implies that the Diocese hadn't any particular reason to have withheld those documents as compared to the far larger number that were disclosed early on.

10. What about the Christian Brothers? Did they really deny claims about them just days before the Ryan Report issued its findings, and did they later admit how inadequate and hurtful their responses to complaints had been?
I believe so. This rings a few bells. Still, do you have any reason to believe that a letter from an Irish religious order to the Irish State had anything whatsoever to do with the Vatican? The Ryan Report didn't link the Brothers with Rome...

11. Fair point. It does seem wildly off-topic. What about the claim that Cardinal Desmond Connell, erstwhile Archbishop of Dublin, had gone to the High Court to prevent his successor, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, from releasing documents to the Murphy Commission?
Yeah, he did that in February 2008, believing that these documents were and should remain legally privileged. It was reported at the time that none of his former colleagues in the Hierarchy nor his former aides in Dublin supported this, something that the article omits. It was only a week later that he withdrew the action, apparently following pressure from the Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, something that the article also fails to mention. In any case, though, do you see any reason to assume that Connell -- and Connell alone -- was somehow acting on behalf of the Vatican to subvert the Murphy Commission?

12. It is hard to see why anyone would think that justifies an attack on Rome. What about the claim that John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan lied to the Church's watchdog about abuse in Cloyne?
They certainly did, though how this could ever be construed as justifying an attack on Rome I do not know. Magee and O'Callaghan lied, but they didn't lie to an agency of the State; they lied to one belonging to the Church. Ian Elliott, the Presbyterian head of the Church's child-protection agency was far from happy about this, and indeed, it was in connection with the Elliott Report that Archbishop Leanza, the outgoing Nuncio, in January 2009 had a private meeting with John Magee in which he appears to have 'suggested' that Magee step down; a few days later Magee requested that the Pope appoint an apostolic administrator. Rome did just that, stripping Magee of his authority and ignoring the candidates he'd suggested as suitable to replace him.

13. Is there any basis for his argument? I see the article says that these senior clergy acted as they did as they understood it as being what Rome wanted from them...
Yes, he's referring specifically to Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos who headed the Congregation for the Clergy between 1996 and 2006. His attitude towards priests was deeply clericalist, and in connection with a letter proving Castrillón Hoyos' excessively protective attitude, Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican Press Office publicly criticised him last April, saying that 'This document is proof of the timeliness of the unification of the treatment of cases of the sexual abuse of minors on the part of members of the clergy under the competency of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, to guarantee rigorous and coherent action, as effectively occurred with the documents approved by the Pope in 2001.'

14. Why does McGarry think Castrillón Hoyos influenced high-ranking members of the Irish clergy to obstruct the State?
You mean, leaving aside the fact that he seems to think the examples he cites support his case, when in fact they're wholly irrelevant to it? He has two reasons, the first of which is the January 1997 letter to the Irish bishops and the second of which is something Castrillón Hoyos is alleged to have said to the bishops when they visited Rome two years later.

15. Tell me about the 1997 letter. That was from the Nuncio of the day, passing on the thoughts of the Congregation for Clergy on the Irish bishops' 1996 Framework Document for dealing with child abuse allegations. Is it true that the Congregation for Clergy dismissed it as 'merely a study document'?
'Dismissed' is a bit strong, but Castrillón Hoyos certainly seems to have understood it that way, largely because it was sent to him, not by the Bishops' Conference, but by an Advisory Committee for that Conference, and was prefaced by a statement that the document was far from being the last word on the subject. I'd like to see that covering letter, but as it stands I think it's understandable that he thought this was a study document, even if the Irish bishops didn't think of it as one.

16. Presumably the Irish bishops, on seeing this response, felt obliged to point out that it had been an official document, not a study document?
Er... no. They basically just ignored it and went ahead with their own agreed policy anyway. Well, in practice Magee didn't, but as far as we know the others did.

17. Okay. You've already talked about what the letter said about the need to follow canon law meticulously, of course. Isn't Castrillón Hoyos the same guy who at Rosses Point in 1998 told the Irish bishops that they should never in any way put an obstacle in the path of civil justice?
That's him. And I'd say that failure to report crimes would constitute just that. You'll note that the article leaves that out, inconvenient as it is to its thesis. In my job, that's called 'cherry-picking the evidence'.

18. Well, what about this mysterious Vatican official who seemingly told the Irish bishops in 1999 that they were 'bishops first, not policemen' when it came to reporting clerical child sex abuse -- who's he?
McGarry doesn't say, for some reason, which may well be that it could be libellous, but it seems to have been Castrillón Hoyos again. Seemingly, on an Irish television documentary called Unspeakable Crimes, shown on 17 January 2011, it was reported that when Irish bishops visited Rome in 1999, a meeting ended in uproar with Castrillon Hoyos telling the bishops that they were called to be 'fathers to your priests, not policemen'.

19. That seems to be slightly different from the quote in the article, but anyway, did the bishops do what he said?
No. I've told you -- they basically ignored the Congregation for Clergy and did their own thing. I don't think they had a good relationship with Castrillón Hoyos. McGarry himself has reported that the previous year Archbishop Connell had resorted to banging his fist with fury on the table in an attempt to get Castrillón Hoyos to understand. Whether or not that's true -- and it does rather undermine the thesis that Connell's legal attempt to obstruct Martin was due to his following Castrillón Hoyos' line --  it's clear that the bishops implemented their own guidelines irrespective of what Castrillón Hoyos thought.

Well, except Magee, who seems to have been a law unto himself anyway.

20. Right, so the article goes on to talk about the 2001 decision to have abuse cases dealt with by Rome. What's that about?
Well, it became very clear through the 1990s that the various dioceses around the world had been mishandling child abuse allegations, and that the Congregation for Clergy, under Castrillón Hoyos, hadn't been helping the situation. As such, on 30 April 2001 John Paul II issued a document called Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela which meant that henceforth all child sexual abuse cases were to go through the then Cardinal Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Part I, article 4 of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela said:

'§ 1.Reservation to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is also extended to a delict against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue committed by a cleric with a minor below the age of eighteen years.
§ 2. One who has perpetrated the delict mentioned in § 1 is to be punished according to the gravity of the offense, not excluding dismissal or deposition.

Note that this document specifically extended the CDF's authority. The CDF had hitherto had only ever dealt with such issues insofar as they were sometimes connected with an abuse of the sacrament of Confession, and in practice it received very few complaints.

21. But Patsy McGarry said this new policy didn't change much in reality?
Yeah, I don't know why he says that. Having received hardly any cases in previous years, the CDF received something like 3,000 cases between 2001 and 2010, most of these from America and detailing offences stretching back to fifty years earlier. I think they get about 250 cases a year now. Monsignor Dolan, the Chancellor of the Dublin Archdiocese, told the Murphy Commission that it had sent nineteen cases to the CDF since 2001.

22. Only nineteen?
Yes, because the policy had to be somewhat modified as Rome wasn't capable of dealing with the avalanche of American complaints in 2003 and 2004. Cases that had already been dealt with before 2001, for instance, weren't revisited by the CDF. In terms of contemporary complaints, however, it has remained the case that all complaints which even reached the threshold of plausibility are to be passed on to Rome so that the CDF could decide whether they'd be best dealt with locally or centrally. And, of course, matters were clarified further by Rome last year, another detail the article neglects to mention.

23. So why does the article say that 'The Cloyne report continues: "The position now, he [Msgr Dolan] said, is that all cases brought to the attention of the archdiocese before April 2001 and which were outside prescription . . . were not going to be dealt with by the CDF. It was up to the bishop to apply disciplinary measures to the management of those priests." In effect, the Irish bishops were back where they were before 2001.'?
I don't know, but it's not true. And for what it's worth, the passage he quotes from section 4:29 of the Murphy Report, and is not in the Cloyne Report at all. That's just sloppiness.

24. McGarry says that Rome didn't grant the Irish bishops permission to make binding either the 1996 Framework Document or the 2005 document Our Children, Our Church, in stark contrast to the approval it gave to the American bishops in 2002 and 2006. Is this true, and if so, why was this?
It is true, and I don't know why. The Murphy Report speculates that the unanimous support of the Irish bishops for the Irish guidelines may have militated against Rome granting them a canonically binding status, but I really don't know. Maybe the American guidelines integrated better into canon law. I don't know.

None of this, however, would have barred any Irish bishop from applying said guidelines within his own diocese. As the Ferns Report recognises, bishops are not delegates of the national bishops' conferences or of the Pope, such that all local decisions rest with them and they are not bound by advice they receive.

25. So when McGarry says that Rome tied the hands of those bishops who wanted to address the abuse issue, this isn't true either?
Exactly. It couldn't have been true. And indeed, we know this, because it seems that almost all Irish bishops ignored the Congregation for Clergy's reservations about the 1996 Framework Document and applied their own policies anyway.

26. What about the letters that were sent to Rome and the last Nuncio that didn't get a response? Did that really happen?
Yes, it did. I think that was extraordinarily bad manners. I really do think an official apology is -- or was -- in order on that.

27. Did it make a difference?
Given that Rome didn't have access to any information on these matters that the Diocese didn't already have, no, it didn't matter in the least. It was rude, that's all.

28. Yes, but what about the fact that the current -- and outgoing -- Nuncio seems to have basically told John Magee to jump from his position rather than be pushed? Surely he wouldn't have done that without access to secret information...
If you'd like to believe that, I have a book about Templars you might want to borrow. The Murphy Report doesn't suggest even for a moment that Leanza had access to any hidden information, and recognises that the Church handed over everything, including all its privileged communications. It's pretty clear that Leanza's prompting of Magee was based on the Elliott Report, which you can read in the Murphy Report.

29. Don't you get tired of correcting these misconceptions?
You have no idea. But as long as our 'newspaper of record' keeps publishing such claptrap, it falls to the rest of us to point out where it's wrong. Child abuse is a horrendous thing that has blighted my country for too long, but political posturing and media misrepresentations aren't part of the solution. It was bad enough when people focused on the Irish Church as a haven of paedophiles while ignoring the far higher number of Irish paedophiles who weren't clergy, such that for every victim of clerical abuse there were fifty-nine victims of non-clerical abuse. But now we're not even looking within, and are trying to point outside ourselves as though the problem is with people far far away. If we want to fix this problem we need to find the real culprits, and if we want to find them, the whole country needs to start looking in the mirror.

30. Do you not think people might accuse you of splitting hairs?
Being Jesuitical, you mean? They might. Others get accused of this. I don't think that anybody hurling those kind of accusations, though, can possibly have immersed themselves in the four Irish state reports and the SAVI study as I have, as well as reading American research and trying to get a serious handle on how the Vatican really works. Too often it's like being in a bizarre University tutorial where you're the only person who's read any of the original sources, but where everybody else has a passionate view on the stuff they've never read. Still, if people shout at you for being honest and informed, that's the way it goes. We have a duty towards the Truth, after all.