An Uncharacteristically Gentle Vincent Brown...

It's a weird feeling, being referred to in the Irish Times and not being able to tell people because it's as 'Thirsty Gargoyle', rather than my actual name. Not an unpleasant one, just a weird one -- last time I didn't have this problem! It's nice to be cited too in connection with one of my favourite Stewart Lee routines, embedded as my quote from it was in the middle of my long Q&A post on Cloyne.

So, there was something about Thursday's Tonight with Vincent Brown that's niggled at me since yesterday, so I watched it again this morning. I've finally figured out what it was.

You'll remember how yesterday I pointed out how flimsy Alan Shatter's explanation of the Taoiseach's most notorious allegation about the Vatican was; well, it turns out that its absurdity was demonstrated later in the programme.

As we've already seen, the basic problem with the plausibility of Shatter's explanation is that it's fundamentally at odds with that ventured by the office of the Taoiseach in July; back then it was said that the Taoiseach hadn't had any particular incident in mind and was speaking of a cumulative effect, whereas now it's maintained that he did have, above all, one very particular incident in mind.

Without seeing the full unadulterated texts of the letter sent in 2009 to the Nunciature by the Murphy Commission and the Nunciature's reply, it's wrong to insist -- as Minister Shatter does -- that the Commission wrote to the Nunciature as an expression of the Vatican, rather than as an entity in its own right, or that it sought all documents or merely those it wouldn't be getting from the Diocese. In fact, section 2.11 of the Cloyne Report at least suggests that the Commission dealt with the Nunciature as a discreet entity, rather than as an arm of Rome, and makes it very clear that the Nunciature expected the Diocese to co-operate fully with the Commission, as indeed it did.

Why did the bishops claim that the Framework Document was official policy?

Amidst all the fog and confusion, Marie Collins raised a very good question, and one which I think Vincent Twomey failed to address adequately. He tried, but in fairness to him, it's hard to correct Mrs Collins' misconceptions or even answer them properly without coming across as someone who cares more about ideas than about people. Somehow accuracy comes across as cold, just as following procedures can come across as unsympathetic. Given that Marie Collins is obviously a very decent person who has in the past suffered terribly through the actions of Irish clergy, the danger is you wind up looking heartless, even when you're nothing of the sort. Marie Collins' question was as follows:

'Why then did the bishops lie to us for ten years, and tell us that that framework document was set in stone, it would be implemented in every diocese, that they were implementing mandatory reporting, and bragged about the fact that their guidelines -- their policies -- were stronger than the civil law, when in fact they didn't even consider it an official document? And the Vatican says, in its response, that the letter didn't affect anything, that the Government hasn't proved that it affected anything. And I'd like to quote something from the Murphy Report that the Government commissioned, and it's Monsignor Dolan who was a civil lawyer and administrator of the Dublin Diocese, and he told the Commission:

"Monsignor Dolan went on to say that understanding behind the Framework Document, was that each diocese or religious institute would enact its own particular protocol for dealing with complaints," this was after it was published. He said, "This in fact never took place because of the response of Rome to the Framework Document."

Because of the letter! Now, that is concrete proof that that letter did have an effect.'

That Monsignor Dolan says the bishops felt hamstrung by the 1997 letter is an important point, and one certainly worth digging into. It doesn't prove by any means that opponents of the Framework Document took solace from the letter, but it does at least suggest that it didn't make life any easier for the bishops. Of course, we know that. The Vatican is hardly a monolith, as John Allen spelled out very clearly in his fine 2004 talk on the 'Top Five Vatican Myths', and it seems clear that there must have been serious divisions in Rome during the 1990s on the how to handle the issue, these matters only being resolved -- in the main -- with the decision in 2001 to have all abuse allegations channelled through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So, yes, while Monsignor Dolan's opinions aren't proof that he was right in his analysis, let alone that anybody took comfort from Rome's attitude to the Irish guidelines, they at least invite questions.

In Cloyne, of course, the problem wasn't that Magee and O'Callaghan didn't try to implement the guidelines as they feared Rome would later overturn disciplinary decisions; it was that O'Callaghan was opposed to dealing with things in a disciplinary and consistent way, and that Magee didn't care how O'Callaghan handled things. It's a bit like Chesterton's famous line about Christianity: it's not that the procedures were tried and found wanting, it's that they were found wanting and left untried.

As for Marie Collins' question, I think it's a good one, being both fair and understandable, and I think it deserves a decent answer.

The answer surely lies in the fact that irrespective of opinions expressed in 1997 by one Vatican department, the Irish bishops were still entirely free to implement guidelines on an individual basis within each individual diocese, and every single bishop indeed made a public commitment to act in accord with those guidelines, such that the guidelines were indeed official in each diocese.

It's a complete exaggeration to say that Vatican had forbidden the bishops from implement the guidelines. On the contrary, rather, one Vatican department had merely cautioned the bishops against implementing the guidelines in such a way as could conflict with canon law, thereby potentially leading to disciplinary measures against abusive priests being overturned on procedural grounds.

Were the guidelines followed? The answer is that we don't know. It appears they've been impeccably followed in Ferns. It seems they have been followed in Dublin, albeit with some difficulty. It's clear they weren't followed at all in Cloyne, despite the bishop of Cloyne having been publicly and officially committed to them.

Did the Nuncio withold the 1997 Letter from the Commission?

But anyway, here's the thing that brings it back to Shatter's nonsense. In connection with his claim that the Nuncio had been asked to furnish all information the Vatican had about the handling of abuse in Cloyne, he elaborated with reference to the 1997 letter, saying that when the Murphy Commission wrote to the Nuncio in 2009, the Nuncio could have responded by, among other things, furnishing the Commission with that letter. Well, all else aside, think for a moment about Marie Collins' question. She was quoting from section 7.13 of the Dublin Report, which itself quotes Dublin's Monsignor John Dolan quoting from the 1997 letter:

'Monsignor Dolan told the Commission that the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome had studied the document in detail and emphasised to the Irish bishops that it must conform to the canonical norms in force. The congregation indicated that "the text contains procedures and dispositions which are contrary to canonical discipline. In particular mandatory reporting gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature". Monsignor Dolan said that the congregation regarded the document as "merely a study document".

Now, Dolan's quotation, at least as recorded by the Commission, leaves out an important chunk of the 1997 text, notably the bit which explains why the Congregation for Clergy was concerned: that the application of the guidelines could potentially clash with canon law, such that bishops trying to stamp out abuse could subsequently have their efforts overturned on purely procedural grounds, which would be obviously be a bad thing (C4.21).

For all that people claimed in January that we'd had no knowledge of the 1997 letter before January of this year, it was cited in the Dublin Report, which was published in November 2009. The Commission had clearly been aware of the existence of the letter when conducting its first report. In light of how the Dublin Report covered the period 1975 to 2004, the letter would obviously have been very relevant to the work of the Commission, which began in 2006. Are we really to believe that it didn't take a look at it then? You know, before it approached the Nuncio in connection with the Cloyne Report? It was obviously important, and it would have been deeply remiss of the Commission to have overlooked it. No, it seems certain that if the Commission was doing its job properly, there would have been no need for the Nuncio to supply this letter, and the Nuncio would have known this. The Dublin Archdiocese must have had a copy, as the Cloyne one obviously did.

A Most Peculiar Programme

It was a strange show, all told, and not just because it featured a Government minister.

I don't think I've ever seen Vincent Brown treat his panellists with such respect. Alan Shatter was given a free platform to, in effect, make all the prepared statements he wanted, and Vincent Brown, who's spoken more of the SAVI study than any other Irish journalist than I can think of, never once challenged him as to whether or not the government is doing anything to protect the overwhelming majority of Irish victims of sexual abuse, these being those abused by people within the family circle. Marie Collins was, understandably enough, not challenged on anything by Vincent Brown, and given the obvious danger of seeming churlish, Vincent Twomey seems to have had some difficulty correcting misconceptions.

Having said that, he made good points. It was very clear from what he said that the problem at Cloyne didn't lie in the Church's procedures, but in the fact that the Cloyne authorities were unwilling to follow those procedures. The best procedures in the world mean nothing if the people whose job it is to implement them will not do so. It's pointless of Alan Shatter to claim that we've no evidence -- no assurance -- that everything's perfect in the Church today. It's simply impossible to tell. Nobody can ever give a confident and honest assurance that rules will not be broken or that crimes will not be committed.

In connection with this, Vincent Twomey's pointing to the Church having appointed a Presbyterian, Ian Elliott, to head the Church's own child-protection agency was important; leaving aside his professionalism and integrity, Elliott's Protestantism blocks him from any instinctive or otherwise ingrained tendencies towards clericalism, and I basically look forward to his coming reports on the dioceses. If things are being handled well, we can all start to breathe comfortably. If they're not, well, then we'll know we have to take action. 

I think the issue of who decides whether or not Elliott's reports should be published is a red herring; it would look staggeringly suspicious if any diocese refused to publish a report, and if any did so because it had something to hide, I'm confident that Elliott would resign in protest. Having said that, I'm glad Vincent Twomey said he believed that all the reports should be published, and I'm glad too that he said he thinks it would be best overall for the credibility of the Church if Cardinal Brady were to resign, simply because this could help the Church and the Country to progress.

Shattered Hope

Until I watched last night's Tonight with Vincent Brown I was reasonably happy with the de-escalation of the row between the Irish Government and the Vatican.  I was thinking that people were starting to talk sense, and that we might be able to move constructively to address the national scourge of child abuse. Things had looked so promising...

No Threat to the Integrity of the Sacrament of Confession

Despite earlier rhetoric, Alan Shatter, the Minister for Justice, had sought to play down claims that the proposed child protection legislation would endanger the seal of confession, dismissing this as a 'bogus side issue', and saying that:

'The focus of the Bill, the heads of which were published at the end of July, is to ensure that where there are what we describe as arrestable crimes, which include child sexual abuse committed against a child, and where an individual has material information that would assist the gardaí in the investigation of that crime, that they provide it to the gardaí, unless there is a reasonable excuse not to do so.'

I've been saying this for a while. Under the Criminal Law Act 1997 and the Offenses Against the State Act 1998, it's already an offense to withold knowledge of certain serious crimes, unless one has reasonable excuse for doing so. The Criminal Justice Act 2011 extended this principle to include theft, such that for the last month it's been a serious criminal offence for anyone -- without reasonable excuse -- to withold from the gardaí knowledge of any theft whatsoever.* All that's being proposed by the Government is that this principle that the reporting of crimes should be mandatory, save in instances where one has a reasonable excuse for not doing so, is to be extended beyond terrorism and theft to include child abuse and the abuse of vulnerable adults.

Does the seal of confession constitute a reasonable excuse? Probably, yes. It can hardly be specifically legislated against, as leaving aside how such a law would be unworkable, it would be struck down by the Supreme Court and challenged by the ECHR, as contravening protections on freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights; the sacrament of reconciliation is an essential aspect of the Catholic faith. Furthermore, the existing common law and constitutional recognitions of priest-penitent privilege would almost certainly preclude the courts against interpreting the seal as anything other than a reasonable excuse. Whatever the Government may say on this is just crowd-pleasing rhetoric; it won't affect the wording or the working of the law.

The Government's Response as a Face-Saving Exercise

I was happy enough with the Government's response to the Vatican's letter of last week too. Much of the letter was constructive enough, recognising how deeply the Vatican regretted the terrible sufferings that victims of abuse and their families had endured in Cloyne, and welcoming the Vatican's commitment to a constructive dialogue and cooperation with the Irish Government in battling abuse in Ireland. The rest was ridiculous, but I don't see that the Government could possibly have taken any other line, if it wanted to save any face at all.

See, for example, the sentence that says,

'Having considered carefully the Cloyne Report and the response of the Holy See, the Government of Ireland remains of the view that the content of the confidential letter in 1997 from the then Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Storero, to the Irish Bishops, regardless of whether or not it was intended to do so, provided a pretext for some members of the clergy to evade full cooperation with the Irish civil authorities in regard to the abuse of minors.'

That'd be fine if it said that the 1997 could have provided a pretext. I think it could have done. The fact remains, however, as the Vatican clearly showed in its letter last week, that there's not a jot of evidence in the Cloyne Report to support the Murphy Commission's finding that the letter had in fact provided such a pretext.

But what choice did the Government have but to take this line? To have admitted that the Vatican was right would have entailed their admitting that the Murphy Commission was wrong -- it would have effectively entailed the Government saying it did not accept the findings of the Murphy Commission. And then what? Would it have had to admit that the Murphy Commission was blatantly wrong in having claimed that the Irish bishops had sought recognition from Rome for the 1996 Framework Document? Would it have had to admit that the dates in chapters 15, 16, and 23 of the Cloyne Report simply don't tally? Would it then have been tempted to wonder whether there was such sloppiness in the Commission's Dublin Report? Would it have looked at chapter 20 of that report, say, and wondered why a priest who was clearly and correctly described by a Garda chief superintendent as having been a curate (20.92) is referred to by the Commission as having been a parish priest? And would it have wondered what other errors the Murphy Commission had made...

The Government reply didn't stop there, of course. In response to the Vatican's comprehensive refutations of allegations made about it in the aftermath of the Cloyne Report, the Government said:

'The Government of Ireland notes the comments in the Holy See’s response on the political debate which ensued in Ireland after the publication of the Cloyne Report and in particular the statements made by the Taoiseach and other political leaders. The Government of Ireland must point out that the comments made by the Taoiseach and other political leaders accurately reflect the public anger of the overwhelming majority of Irish people at the failure of the Catholic Church in Ireland and the Holy See to deal adequately with clerical child sexual abuse and those who committed such appalling acts.'

Which seems to be code for, yes, well, whether or not we lied is hardly the point: we were angry, and you need to understand that. We were reflecting popular anger. This, of course, is something the Vatican had already acknowledged in its response, saying that it understood and shared the depth of public anger and frustration at the findings of the Cloyne Report, as expressed in Enda's speech. Still, it looked as though the Government wasn't defending Enda's lies, so much as saying that we was angry, and the Vatican should allow for crazy things said in a rage.

It really looked as though it'd be possible to move forward together.




Unfortunately, then Vincent Brown pressed Alan Shatter on the issue...
And Alan Shatter was only too happy to respond. In fact, I'd say he was delighted to do so. Government ministers don't face Vincent Brown all that often, so the fact that Shatter accepted the invitation to show up is a pretty clear sign that he wanted to say something. Vincent didn't beat about the bush, and opened by asking Shatter to explain what the Taoiseach had meant when he had told the Dáil that:

'It's fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic.as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.'

As Archbishop Martin said the other day, 'this merits explanation'. And indeed it does, given the conflicting and blatantly false explanations offered thus far. Our Minister for Justice smiled calmly, and began to offer a very specific explanation, one that wholly belied the Taoiseach's own spokesman's admission last July that the allegation hadn't been made with any particular incident in mind:

'Very easily answered, Vincent, in the context of the Murphy Commission investigation into Cloyne. The Murphy Commission wrote to the Papal Nuncio -- the Papal Nuncio was written to as the Vatican's ambassador in Dublin -- to ask him, and I quote, "does he have any information about the matters under investigation by Cloyne." That request was asking him, as the Vatican's representative in Dublin to make available any information the Vatican had to assist it in its inquiry. The Commission got a very simple response, an entirely inappropriate response, and a response which was intended to frustrate the Commission's work. The response simply was that the Vatican does not determine the handling of cases of child abuse in Ireland, and is therefore unable to assist in the matter.'

Now, the first thing we should all pick up on here is that if this had been what the Taoiseach had been talking about when he made his speech, it would have been very easy for his spokespeople to have said so; it wouldn't have been necessary to witter about the Taoiseach having had no specific incident in mind. It also conflicts quite sharply with what Andrew Madden informed the Irish Examiner the Taoiseach's people had told him back in July. It's very obvious that this is something the Government has recently come up with in an attempt to deflect criticism of the fact that the Taoiseach defamed the Vatican and misled the Dáil.

The second is that the claim that the Nuncio 'intended to frustrate the Commission's work' is a very serious one, and one which I doubt the Minister for Justice would be able to substantiate in court; putting it another way, this almost certainly constitutes defamation.

Third, and this is a subtle but very important point, the Minister here is blatantly not quoting from the letter the Murphy Commission wrote to the Nuncio; it surely wasn't the case that the Murphy Commission addressed the Nuncio in the third person. Rather, he seems to have adapated a partial quotation from the Report. This matters, because if we look at the Dublin Report, which quotes from the Commission's February 2007 letter to the previous Nuncio, the Commission asked that Nuncio to supply all relevant documents 'which documents have not already been produced or will not be produced by Archbishop Martin'. That, of course, makes perfect sense, as the Commission would hardly have wanted to plough through heaps of duplicate documents in its investigation of how matters were handled in Dublin; it's difficult to believe that it was any more willing to do that in connection with Cloyne. You'll see the significance of this in a bit, if you haven't already guessed it.

Fourth, the Minister appears to be wrong when he says that the Nunciature claimed that the Vatican did not determine the handling of abuse cases in Ireland. At least according to the Cloyne Report, it claimed that the Nunciature itself does not determine the handling of abuse cases. The Report doesn't suggest for a moment that the Commission asked the Nunciature for any information held by the Vatican, or that the Nunciature was answering on behalf of the Holy See rather than on behalf of itself. This may have been the case, but unless the original letters are produced we can only go by what the Cloyne Report says, which belies the Minister's claims.


Sure while the waters are muddy, why not kick them up some more?
Anyway, the minister carried on:

'We know this isn't correct in a number of respects. For example, the notorious letter of 1997 -- I was going to say 2007 -- the notorious letter of 1997, that was sent by the Papal Nuncio's predecessor to the bishops in Dublin and the rest of the country. That made reference to what was called the Framework Document, a document in 1996 that the bishops published which set out guidelines they said they themselves were going to apply in addressing issues of child abuse, which guidelines included a commitment to make reports to the civil authorities. The letter which was distributed by the Papal Nuncio made it very clear that the Vatican didn't approve of those guidelines, a warning was issued that they were contrary to canon law, and quite clearly expressed substantial reservations with regard to the reporting to the civil authority.'

Let's leave aside the technical point that it wasn't the bishops, but an advisory group for the bishops, that published the Framework Document, and start by noting that the fact that the guidelines outlined in the Framework Document were, at least in principle, adopted as official policy in every diocese in Ireland, despite the reservations expressed in the 1997, conclusively demonstrates that it was not the Vatican -- much less the Nunciature itself -- that determined the handling of abuse cases in Ireland. It's worth stressing too that the 1997 letter by no means made it clear that the Vatican disapproved of the guidelines, which is hardly surprising given that it had had input into them. On the contrary, it merely indicated that one Vatican department had concerns about how the guidelines might be applied, not least because that one department felt they could be applied in a way contrary to canon law, such that they could lead to disciplinary decisions having to be overturned; the concern, in essence, was that the guidelines might lead to genuine abusers getting off the hook on procedural grounds.

Or, if you like, that they were potentially not strict enough.

It's again completely wrong to misrepresent the letter as having 'quite clearly expressed substantial reservations with regard to the reporting to the civil authority'. It expressed concerns about mandatory reporting, not reporting in general, and it was not alone in this. The Irish Government of 1997 was just as troubled by the idea of mandatory reporting, such that after a wide consultation process it decided against legislating for it. That government, it's important to note, included six people at its cabinet table who hold full ministries in the current government, these being Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton, Michael Noonan, Brendan Howlin, Ruairi Quinn, and Pat Rabbitte, who used to participate in cabinet meetings despite being a junior minister. Shatter's pot is calling the Vatican's kettle black on this one.


Because what need for truth, when there's political kudos to be won?
Alan continued:

'The Papal Nuncio, when receiving the request from the Murphy Commission, could have furnished that letter. The Papal Nuncio could have sought the assistance of the Vatican to provide to the Murphy Commission information it had about the abuse of children in Cloyne. It did none of that. And essentially, instead of co-operating, and assisting with the work of that commission, it frustrated its work, and that's the simple point the Taoiseach was making.'

Now, again, ask yourself this: what exactly did the Commission ask the Nunciature for? Did it ask it for everything, or did it ask for everything it hadn't already been given or wasn't going to be given by the Diocese? And if it did ask for everything, which I doubt, did it need duplicate copies of documents that already had or was due to receive from the diocese? Why should the Nuncio have passed over a letter which the Diocese -- as we know -- itself passed over? Why should the Nuncio have sought the assistance of the Vatican in providing for the Murphy Commission duplicates of documents connected with the five priests whose cases were passed on to Rome, documents the Commission openly acknowledges were all passed on to it by the Diocese?

Of these five cases, for what it's worth, it seems that only one of them was handled by Rome in any sense during the period covered by the Cloyne Report, that being the case of Father Caden, whose case was reported to Rome in 2005; the Vatican ruled that 'Father Caden' should be barred from ministry. The Commission notes how it has received all documentation on this matter, which, as it happens, is the only incident in Cloyne which has led to a conviction, this being an eighteen-month suspended sentence. The names of four other priests who had been risk-assessed were passed on to Rome in late January 2009, but it appears that no data was passed to Rome about them until February and March of 2009, a period beyond the Murphy Commission's remit. One of these was 'Father Ronat', who had been barred from ministry by the Diocese since 2005. It's worth noting that the State was for a long time incapable of pressing charges against him, and when he finally went to court, he was acquitted of the crime for which he was accused. If anything, it seems the Church has been rather more strict in these matters than has the State.


I don't think Vincent has ever gone so long without interrupting anyone...
Given his tendency to bully and hector his panellists, it was amazing to watch Vincent Brown actually listening, and waiting before following up. In a daring break with tradition, he allowed Shatter to finish what he was saying:

'But it isn't the most important issue. I mean, at the end of the day, what the Government is focused on, and what the Government's statement it issued this evening again emphasises,  is that our concern as a government is to protect the welfare of children, and what we want to ensure is that on the civil side -- in the context of action we take as a Government -- we put in place all of the extra provisions and protections that are necessary, but we also want to ensure that in the future those who become aware that children have been abused inform the Garda Síochána, they inform the HSE, and ultimately the new childcare protection authority that's going to be established, and that we're not in a position where abuse occurs and subsequently a report is made to someone, be it a member of the Church or indeed to another individual in any other organisation, and they don't act, they say nothing, and that abuser is left to continue to abuse again, either the same victim, or other victims.'

Now, it would be nice if all this were true, but I really don't believe it is. Shatter talks here as though most child sex abuse in Ireland were institutional -- and indeed, primarily clerical -- in nature. This simply isn't true. As the SAVI study showed, and as the Gardaí and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland have said, almost all abuse in Ireland takes place within the family circle, being perpetuated by immediate and extended family, family friends, neighbours, and babysitters. By targetting the Church as the Government has done, it has directed the attention of the country away from where the real danger to Ireland's children is to be found. By doing so, it puts Ireland's children at risk, and it shows a deep contempt by the overwhelming majority of Ireland's abuse survivors.

Child abuse is far too important and heinous a thing to be exploited for political advantage by the Irish Government. We need a better solution that this, and not one that seeks to turn people far away into a scapegoat for our problems.

* Yes, that apparently means that if you ever witnessed a schoolmate shoplifting when you were a teenager yourself, and didn't report it, then you may well be a criminal. Best get yourself down to the Garda station before it's too late.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Ten

So, as you'll remember from last week, the brother was in Sligo, where, nine weeks into his Painting Tour of Ireland, he'd taken a trip out to Lough Gill, there to squint across to Innisfree. It was at Lough Gill that he saw a sign warning him of cars crawling, like Scottish plesiosaurs, from the lake, a phenomenon first documented by Yeats in his lesser-known work, 'Car Pool'.

Friday saw the Brother missing a Dalkey Open Bottle night and poring over maps and unfinished paintings as he plotted an ambitious week, taking in more counties than any week thus far. He'd opened with a five-county week, as you'll surely recall, but since then he's lingered more, visiting two new ones in his second week, one in each of his third and fourth weeks, two in each of his fifth and sixth weeks, none at all in his glorious Galwegian seventh week which included what may have been his favourite ever day in the saddle, one in his eighth, and one in his ninth. Fifteen counties he'd covered, but with time running out, he was needing to make plans, and hopefully plans that wouldn't entail him painting, like Picasso, while riding a bicycle.

With the poring and plotting done, it was time for him to stary pedalling and painting, cycling out to Ballygawley there to buy some potato cakes and perplex me by describing it as our namesake, but given its proper Irish name, he's absolutely right. Onwards then to Riverstown in the rain, aptly enough, where he shook his head at the superabundance of hanging baskets, that hallmark of the typically tidy Irish town, and carried on past Lough Arrow and into Roscommon, his sixteenth county.

This week we shall be mostly seeing lakes. And rain.

Onward he pedalled past Lough Key, where he'd had a holiday with the lads from over the road back in his early teens, and though he'd been hoping to make it to Carrick-on-Shannon, reason and the rain won out and he stopped in Boyle, sodden, starving, and saddlesore. Seemingly, it wasn't quite as devoid of people as photographic evidence would suggest. With a busy evening's painting ahead of him, he found a B&B and swiftly went in search of food, settling for a rather dangerous-sounding choice in Shop Street's Troy Deli: a twelve-inch pizza, festooned with kebab meat. Perhaps not advisable fare for normal people, but if you're touring Ireland under your own steam, I reckon it'd be safe enough. It takes calories to cover ground, after all. And, you know, it might be tasty.

-- Is that your bicycle, he was asked.
-- It is, yes.
-- There's a fair length on it.

And that was Friday. Saturday saw him waking up to a lovely view of Boyle Abbey, and then carrying on south-east, hitting Carrick at noon or so, crossing the bridge into Leitrim and pedalling another hundred yards or so to be treated to lunch by someone who's been following the Brother's exploits here -- and thank you so much! -- in the company of his brood, who were very impressed with my the Brother's beard and his energy. As the Brother later said, 'Today a stranger stepped out of the internet into offline life to treat me to lunch on the road. Follow @gkcwsc Make him love the twitter'.

Although the Brother had crossed over into Leitrim for his lunch, he didn't count that as a seventeenth county, feeling that being barely a hundred yards into a county hardly counted, especially when he'd be covering more ground there soon enough, so he cut back to Roscommon, carrying on through Kilmore and Forest View, crossing the Shannon at Termonberry, and entering his real seventeenth county, that being Longford. South he cycled then, through Clondra, Kilashee, and Lyneen until he reached Kenagh, his base for the night.

Kenagh, in case you're wondering, is where a youthful Dave Allen lost a chunk of a middle finger. I have no idea whether or not it's anywhere to be found in the neighbourhood, but if it is and you come across it, I imagine you'd be allowed to keep it. I learned this when I stayed in Kenagh myself a couple of years back, visiting the same friends who hosted the Brother on Saturday evening, a lovely couple whose wedding I once blighted by falling asleep in a way that did me no honour whatsoever. If you're good, I may tell you the story someday.

Sunday morning saw him being graced with an immense breakfast of rashers and eggs and lashings of sausages, all washed down with a balthazar or so of tea, and then settling in for some serious painting in the rain while my friends took themselves off on a cycle of their own, an organised 50 kilometres tour of Longford. Regretting the time constraints on the trip, not least because he'd not be able to get out to see the Corlea Trackway, a second-century BC road in the bog near Kenagh, he saddled up again, and set off, this time heading north. The rain was gone, he felt, and it was time he was too.

Off he went through Longford town, with its sinister courthouse and foreboding cathedral, and north through Drumlish and into Leitrim, which this time earned itself the title of Eolaí's Eighteenth County to accompany its prior title of Ireland's Only County Without Traffic Lights. Onward he rode, north to Cloone and then east through Carrigallen, before turning north again, edging his way a mile or so across the Leitrim border into Cavan, his nineteenth county, there to stay in Doogarry, a stone's throw from this charming spot.

His arrival was clearly a special event, with his host's nine-year-old son preparing for it by cleaning the bathroom for his first time ever. This must be what Billy Connolly had in mind when he said he reckoned he thought the Queen thought the whole world smelled of fresh paint...

Like I said. Lakes. Get used to it.

If Sunday had been notable for being his first three-county day since he made his way from Kerry to Limerick via Clare in the fifth week of his Odyssey, Monday's most memorable feature was to be the rain, it being the wettest day of the trip so far. It didn't start that way, though. No, first there was some painting in the sun, fuelled by tea and with a nervous eye on the sky, and then it was time to push on through the most diabolical of conditions. North he rode, lakes to the left and lakes to the right, pedalling on through Bawnboy and on to Swanlinbar, there to recover with potato cakes after a detour and a mudslide on a road that just wasn't there.

Over the border, then, into Fermanagh, the twentieth county of the trip, heading north to Letterbreen, and then west, through Belcoo to Cavan's Blacklion, but back then into Belcoo, more drenched than ever after the wettest day of the tour, there to spend the night in his twentieth county.

By this point it was getting difficult to tell where the puddles stopped and the lakes started.

Tuesday saw him making his way back through Blacklion again, cutting across Cavan along the southern shores of Lough Macnean. It wasn't long before he was back in Leitrim, with the wind almost blasting him under a van as he cycled through Glenfarne to Manorhamilton, and the rain swirling and crashing about him. A break in Manorhamilton was well deserved, as was the rather peculiar lunch that presented itself on the menu: a chicken, bacon, mushroom, and banana sandwich.

Yes, you read that right.

While the Brother was fighting with the elements and sampling gastronomic oddities, plans were being made for his return to Sligo, this time to stay with Annie West. Seeming, she had big plans for his arrival. According to her Twitter feed, she had contract cleaners, an interior designer and a couple of plasterers all getting things ready, while she herself was sorting out some William Morris wallpaper and a huge consignment of eighteenth-century Italian furniture for his room, all the while fretting about whether she'd be able to install an Adams fireplace before the Brother pedalled up the path. And that's not to mention the time she claimed to be putting into training the dog and cat to avert their eyes appropriately. Call be sceptical, but I think she might have been exaggerating ever so slightly, at least about the trumpets, bugles, guns, and bunting. Mind, I've not met the lady, so who am I to judge?

Before braving the elements once more, the Brother saw fit to delight the Battlestar Galactica fans among us with a fine Leitrim shot, and then it was off he set again, back into what he described as the 'windiest, blusteriest, paininthearseiest' day of cycling thus far. This time he left the main road, taking a quieter road to Glencar, past the lake and waterfall of 'The Stolen Child' fame, soon reaching Sligo again, turning north by Drumcliffe to be greeted by miles of bunting, trumpets, bugles, a twenty-one gun salute, and buckets of tea* as he brought to a close a rare and tempestuous four-county day.

Happy and safe and warm and dry that evening, he pored over maps and delighted to see that while he'd been battling against the elements, the tale of his Painting Tour, as told by John Lee, had been picked up by the Huffington Post.

After Tuesday's exploits, yesterday was very quiet, with hardly a tweet from the Brother, other than an understandably glum comment about how dispiriting the weather was -- there's not much joy in cycling in such apocalyptic conditions, especially when the nicer side roads have to be shunned in favour of the bigger, faster, dirtier roads, where puddles and vans can combine to such soul-destroying effect. To judge by Twitter, you'd think he'd ended it with his bike tended by ducks,  rumours starting to spread that he'd been kidnapped and wasn't to be allowed leave.

The Brother's favourite bike shot of the trip, taken during Wednesday night's dinner.

Instead, it seems he'd indeed spent the day painting Annie's house while she worked in her studio, before going up the road to stay with Donal Conaty, the Man Behind The Mire, there to dine and paint and chat and sleep.

And as for today? Well, the Brother started the day reckoning it'd be hard to leave Sligo -- and not because he was trapped in a Misery-style situation by a wannabe Kathy Bates, but just because he liked it so much there and weather looked to be getting ready to take arms against him yet again.

Still, the weather was good to begin with as he was taken for a drive by Streedagh Strand and up to the Horseshoe Pass; unfortunately his camera decided to pack in, leaving him to describe the day as the best he'd ever had for photographs he'd not taken. Back from the drive he had to race against time to manage a very hasty painting of his hosts' house before leaping onto the bike to make it Donegal town before sunset. The afternoon dash hit a hitch almost immediately, as soon after Mullaghmore he was struck down with stomach cramps, and so forced to rest on Leitrim's tiny coast, there to let his stomach settle and to take some tablets to help his left leg. The terrain may be easier now than it was in Cork and Kerry, but the weather can't be making things any easier on the Brother's legs -- when you have to fight with the bike to make it move, you're heading for trouble, and especially with the days getting shorter and there being less time available to cycle and to paint.

The tablets having done their work, and after his first ever power bar, he set off again, winding his way into Donegal, his twenty-first county, through Ballyshannon, and eventually arriving to a bunting-festooned Donegal town.**

Six counties in a week. You can't help admiring that. I'd still not put money on him managing every county in the country, given the logistics of what's left of the trip, but as Meatloaf would probably say, thirty out of thirty-two ain't bad. Or twenty-nine or twenty-eight, to be fair. The clock's ticking, and time shall be money.

So, what does the next week hold? Truth be told I'm not entirely sure, save that he's clearly planning on heading across Tyrone into Derry and from there into Antrim and Down. Other than that, I really don't know.

Still, if you think the Brother might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live, especially if you're in Down, Armagh, Monaghan or, well, anywhere else that looks even plausible over the next fortnight as the Brother makes his way home to Dublin, and if you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, do get in touch with him. As long as you have a kettle, tea, milk, and somewhere to doze, he'd love to hear from you.

There's only a fortnight left of the Painting Tour, and if you want to get onboard, you can follow it on the Brother's blog and above all on Twitter, where the hashtag's #paintingtour. The Brother's Facebook account's worth a shout too, but Twitter's where most of the real action is. 

Don't be afraid to give Ireland's first digital nomad™ a shout -- the tour's about Irish social media as much as it is art and the Irish countryside, after all.

* Or at least one of the above, after stopping cycling in sodden terror, but yards from his destination, with a storm bellowing around him, trucks roaring past, and his hostess waiting across the road in her car, having come out to look for his body.
** No, really. Look at the picture.

The Taoiseach's Speech Revisited

In the aftermath of the Cloyne Report -- and to a lesser degree before it -- I've written a lot of posts about abuse in Ireland. Those of you who've been following me will understand where I'm coming from on this, but for any newcomers, it may help if I quickly explain three things.

First, I believe sexual abuse is endemic in Ireland. Research carried out by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in connection with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, and published in 2002 as the Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) Study, indicated that 27.1% of Irish adults surveyed in 2001 were survivors of one form or another of child sexual abuse. Based on the 2002 census figures, this means that a decade ago there must have been something of the order of 780,000 Irish adults who'd been abused as children. Of these, 530,000 had been subject to contact sexual abuse, and of those, 120,000 had been raped.

(It's difficult to tell whether abuse is significantly more prevalent in Ireland than elsewhere. Different sampling and research methods have been used in different countries, such that it's hard to compare figures. It looks as though Ireland is among the worse countries for this sort of thing, but the evidence doesn't suggest that it is an outlier in a general sense. As a clue towards this, Colm O'Gorman's One in Four organisation was founded in the UK in 1999, three years before the SAVI study revealed that the abuse rate in Ireland indeed was roughly one-in-four.)

Second, I believe the constant media focus on the Catholic Church in respect of this is not merely unfair, but is in fact dangerous. I don't deny for one moment that there have been far too many priests who ruined the lives of Irish children, and that the Irish superiors of these priests were -- for whatever reasons -- unwilling or unable to take decisive steps to protect those children. They disgraced themselves and the Church, and they have done untold harm to -- I suspect -- several thousand Irish children. Having said that, the SAVI figures indicate that for every survivor of sexual abuse committed by a priest, there are fifty-nine survivors of sexual abuse committed by people other than clergy. These are hardly ever discussed in the media or by Irish politicians, as the focus of debate in these matters remains relentlessly -- and almost exclusively -- trained on the Church.

The narrative that paints abuse in Ireland as primarily a clerical problem commits a grave injustice against the hundreds of thousands of Irish abuse survivors whose stories are largely ignored, and it directs people away from where the real dangers are to Irish children nowadays. Almost all sexual abuse takes place within the broad family circle, being committed by immediate and extended family, family friends, neighbours, and babysitters; by choosing to keep the abuse discussion focused on historical matters within the Church, we distract people's attention from genuine and greater threats in their own homes. In doing so, we're putting Ireland's children at risk.

Third, in connection with Cloyne in particular, I have been appalled at how the Irish Government has sought to use child abuse as a political football, and has taken advantage of the fact that children were abused by priests in Cloyne in order to grandstand and posture. I appreciate that this is a difficult time to govern, given the mess the country is in and the limitations on what the Government can do, but I don't think that there's any excuse for the bluster and the lies that have disgraced Ireland's public discourse over the last couple of months. The Cloyne Report found, in essence, one thing, which was that over a thirteen-year-period, two clergymen didn't apply the Church's own rules. That's all. It didn't find that the reported abuse occurred, though I'm inclined to believe that in most cases it did, and it most certainly didn't find that the Holy See had sought to cover up abuse.

In short, I believe abuse is a hugely serious problem in Ireland, such that more than a quarter of Irish adults appear to have been abused in their childhood, almost all of them having been abused by people who weren't priests and who were usually within the family circle. We need to deal with this, and we need to do so very carefully. Basically, we need to take a good, long look at ourselves, and refrain from pointing fingers at other people as though they're responsible for our problems. They're not. We are. A good start would be for the Government to engage with the problem in a serious way, rather than by trying to make political capital out of children having been sexually abused.


Which brings me to Enda Kenny...
Back in July, as we all know, Enda gave a speech in the Dáil in which he said a lot of admirable things about what the Irish State should be doing to protect Irish children, glossed over the failings of State institutions identified in the Cloyne Report, passed over entirely the failings of the two Irish clergymen on whose actions the Cloyne Report was concentrated, and said an awful lot of things about the Vatican which were completely false and had no basis whatsoever in the Cloyne Report.

And people loved him for it. Because it's okay to lie to the Dáil if it's about somebody you dislike.

The Irish Government demanded answers from the Vatican, and last week it got them. One particular detail, however, remains to be explained. Here's Enda blustering in full gale:

'It's fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy Reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic.as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.'

In its response to the Irish Government, the Vatican devotes three paragraphs to this particular claim, noting that in the aftermath of the speech, a Government spokesman admitted the Taoiseach hadn't been refering to anything in particular when he made that claim. The response goes on to note that the Cloyne Report made no statement that could conceivably support the Taoiseach's claim, and that in the report the Murphy Commission acknowledged the full co-operation it had received from all parties, including the Church, which -- unlike the Department of Health -- even made available all relevant privileged communications.


One Good Cop?
Now, on Saturday Archbishop Martin made a statement in which he noted the sober measured tone of the Vatican response, and said that he hoped it wouldn't become an occasion for further polemics, as these do very little for the protection of children and the support of survivors. Martin had, of course, made a similar point in the immediate aftermath of the Taoiseach's speech.:

'I don’t want to see a polarisation between Church, State, Voluntary groups -- we all should be working together to see that children are protected.'

He's completely right, of course. Abuse appears to be endemic in Irish society. Trying to create a polarised conflict between Church and State will do nothing to help this situation, and will only do harm. We have, over the past couple of months, been on the brink of a deeply divisive and profoundly damaging internal conflict, just at a time when we need to be working together. It wasn't for nothing that I quoted yesterday from one of the most famous descriptions of what happens during internal wars. It's very obvious that those determined to stir up such a conflict don't have the interests of abuse survivors or vulnerable children at heart. They may say they do, but they don't. At most, they might have genuine concern for the interests of the one-abuse-survivor-in-sixty who'd been abused by a priest, but it's pretty clear that they either don't know or don't care about the other fifty-nine.

Anyway, although much of his statement was spent trying to calm tempers and put out fires, Archbishop Martin felt obliged to pick up on one specific allegation:

'One of the key points of the Taoiseach’s intervention was the assertion that “the Holy See attempted to frustrate an enquiry in a sovereign democratic republic as little as three years ago not three decades ago”.  There is no evidence presented in the Murphy Report to substantiate this, the Holy See could find no evidence and the Department of An Taoiseach’s office said that the Taoiseach was not referring to any specific event.  This merits explanation.'

And it does. You can't just say things like that. It's not just that it's not diplomatic. It's a matter of basic decency: you can't hurl around accusations unless you're willing to back them up.



Venturing an Explanation
Of course, some have thought it requires no explanation at all, presumably in the assumption that if you don't like somebody it's wholly acceptable to say whatever you like about them. Others, apparently, seem to think that publicly-expressed serious allegations don't require public justifications. Andrew Madden seems to think it's all very straightforward, at least according to the Irish Examiner:

'As for the reference by Mr Kenny, [Madden] said he had checked with Mr Kenny’s department at the time of the Dáil speech and was told it referred to the failure by the Cloyne hierarchy to implement child protection guidelines until 2008 and to the refusal by the papal nuncio in Ireland, Giuseppe Leanza, to answer questions to the independent Murphy Inquiry in the belief that foreign diplomats were not expected to answer to national commissions or tribunals.'

Keep that in mind. In July the Department of the Taoiseach was, at least according to one prominent abuse survivor, taking the line that the Taoiseach's claim about the Cloyne Report having revealed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an Irish statutory inquiry since 2008 referred to

a) the failure of two Irish clergymen to implement the Irish Church's own child protection guidelines, something which only a maniac could claim was the same as an alleged attempt by Rome to frustrate a statutory inquiry,

and

b) the refusal, based on the belief that foreign diplomats had no obligation to answer to national commissions, of Giuseppe Leanza to answer the Murphy Commission's questions, something which the Cloyne Report does not report having happened.

Now, leaving aside that neither of these instances tallies with the Taoiseach's speech, as is obvious to anyone who's read both it and the Cloyne Report, Enda has since attempted to explain what he meant, and has done so in a way that contradicts this previous explanation, allegedly offered by his office.


The Story as it currently stands...
Speaking at a Fine Gael meeting in Galway, Enda said of the speech that he'd been trying to reflect the frustration of the Irish people, insisting:

'I made the point that this is a statutory commission of inquiry and as such nothing less than full cooperation is required, and anything less than full co-operation in my view is unwarranted interference.'

All of a sudden the mystery is solved! Words mean what they want to mean where Enda is concerned. 'Interference,' as far as he's concerned, has a meaning broad enough to mean 'no interference whatsoever'. He didn't stop there, though:

'As a member of the Catholic Church, I want to see the Church of which I am a member as absolutely above reproach in the issue of this and other areas. And for that reason, my claim in the Dáil still stands, because this was a statutory commission of inquiry. And in 2006, and 2007 and in 2009, there were requests for information and assistance to the Vatican by the Murphy Commission and in each of these cases that request was either refused or rejected.'

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think it'd not be remiss of us to look again at what Enda actually said in the Dáil. He said that the Cloyne Report showed, as no investigation had ever before done -- and he specifically contrasted it with Murphy Commission's Dublin Report -- an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an Irish Inquiry, this having happened, he said, less than three years earlier.


2006 and 2007 were more than three years ago, Enda...
Whatever happened in 2006 and 2007 is obviously irrelevant to Enda's claim, as events prior to 2008 predate his rhetorical three-year timescale. Only the 2009 event can possibly have had any relevance to this allegation. Having said that, it's worth sketching the two incidents.

In 2006, the Murphy Commission wrote to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, asking it for information, and got no reply, the CDF instead contacting the Department of Foreign Affairs, asking why the Commission had not gone through diplomatic channels (Dublin Report, 2.23). The Dublin Report omitted to mention that in contacting the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Vatican said that if the Irish Government wanted it to address this matter that it would like it to be sent through diplomatic channels -- in other words with a covering letter from the Irish Government -- and that it would co-operate. A subsequent effort was not made to contact the Vatican in this regard, as though a statutory body, the Murphy Commission did not believe it was appropriate to use diplomatic channels. The Irish Government seems to have let the issue drop. That's our problem, not the Vatican's.

In 2007, the Murphy Commission wrote to the then Papal Nuncio, Giuseppe Lazzarotto, asking him to supply any relevant information the Nunciature had, other than that already produced or to be produced by Archbishop Martin, or to confirm that he had no such documentation, if that was the case (Dublin Report, 2.24). Lazzarotto did not reply, which was undoubtedly very bad manners. While I still think an explanation for this would be desirable, I don't see that this rude lack of co-operation would have impeded the Murphy Commission in any respect, given how the Nunciature doesn't handle abuse cases, and how the Dublin Archdiocese disclosed all relevant documentation to the Commission.


And that takes us to 2009
So, what happened in 2009? Well, the Cloyne Report describes quite clearly how it approached various bodies for any data they might have held relevant to the Commission's work, with the Nunciature being asked to submit any information which it had about the matters under investigation (2.11). The Nunciature replied saying that it held no relevant information as it did not determine the handling of abuse cases, something which is true and which the Cloyne Report does not contest. It's hard to see how saying that you lack information which you genuinely lack could ever be construed as a lack of co-operation, much less interferences, but I guess the Taoiseach's mind works in its own way.

It's also striking that this is clearly a more helpful response from the Nunciature than the sepulchral silence of 2007, such that I can't for the life of me see how Enda could ever maintain that this was worse than the unresponsiveness of two years earlier. Remember, Enda said that the Vatican's actions within the last three years, as revealed in the Cloyne Report, had been worse than anything the Dublin Report had described it as doing.

The Nunciature, however, didn't stop with that, and added that the Diocese of Cloyne was obliged to comply fully with all Irish civil laws and regulations. In effect, given that the Murphy Commission was a statutory inquiry, it said that the Diocese of Cloyne was obliged to comply fully with the Commission, not least by submitting any information it held about the matters being investigated. The Commission notes that the Diocese did just that, even supplying all privileged communication, including privileged copies of communications that had been sent to Rome (2.12).

In this, it should be noted, the Church stands in sharp contrast to the Irish Department of Health and Children which refused to disclose a number of documents, claiming privilege over them (2.11). Presumably, by failing to co-operate fully with the Commission, the Department of Health and Children is, in our Taoiseach's flexible mind, itself guilty of 'unwarranted interference'.


Anyway, in short, the Taoiseach lied. I've said it before, and I'm not the only one to have done so, and doubtless I'll say it again. He lied to the Dáil, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he did so in an attempt to make political capital out of children having been abused. That was a vile thing for him to have done, and he should be ashamed of himself.

The Vatican's Response to the Irish Government: First Thoughts

Whether or not it was the Californian Senator Hiram Johnson who coined the phrase, 'when war comes, the first casualty is truth,' is a matter of some debate. What's clear, though, is that others expressed a similar sentiment before him. Samuel Johnson, for instance, writing in The Idler in 1758, numbered the diminution of the love of truth among the calamities of war. More than two thousand years before Johnson, however, the Athenian Thucydides had made the very same point in his description of social unrest and civil war in the Greek world of the fifth-century BC:

'Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.'

I've been thinking about this passage quite a bit over the past few days, as I've been watching from afar the reactions in Ireland to the Vatican's response to the Cloyne Report and to the views expressed about that report by the Irish government.

I happen to think that the response is a good one. It comprehensively explains the Vatican's own actions in connection with the Cloyne Report in a calm and measured way, attempting to banish misconceptions while at the same time seeking to defuse tensions.

Unfortunately, it seems that where the current Irish government is concerned, to be accurate is to be 'very technical and legalistic', while facts are to be dismissed as 'pettifogging detail'. For others, familiarity with what the Cloyne Report actually says is not straightforward evidence of the document having been read in a careful and responsible way, but rather is the unmistakeable sign that 'the gimlet eye of the canon lawyer' has been at work. 

I'm not sure when accuracy, honesty, and thoroughness stopped being regarded as virtues. I may have been away too long.

Anyway, Let's take a look at the Vatican's response. Not in detail -- it's short enough for everyone who actually cares about this matter to read the whole thing for themselves, and I'll return to this tomorrow in any case -- but just to pull out a few salient points to help in thinking about it. It might be worthwhile, first, to refresh your memories on the key issues related to the Cloyne Report.


1. Who's the response for?
The response is addressed, quite explicitly, to the Irish Government, in the person of the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs. It is a formal diplomatic communication from the government of one state to that of another. Atypically, this communication has been published on the Vatican website, but this is in the interests of transparency and of the need to refute publicly certain public allegations made against the Vatican. Unlike last year's pastoral letter it is not directed to the Irish Church or the Irish people in general, and should not be read as though it is.

This must especially be kept in mind when Irish politicians or pundits complain about the response being largely devoted to stuff that's of little interest to Irish parents or the Irish people in general. Leaving aside how I'd hope that Irish people would, in the main, still be interested in the truth, the response isn't addressed to Irish parents or the Irish people in general. It's addressed to the Government.


2. What does the response address?
As requested by the Irish Government, the letter is a response to two things: the Cloyne Report itself, and the Irish Government's views on the matter. At its heart is a response to the Tánaiste's demand for an explanation of why, in the Government's view, the Vatican intervened to have priests believe they could in conscience evade their responsibilities under Irish law:

'I want to know why this State, with which we have diplomatic relations, issued a communication, the effect of which was that very serious matters of the abuse of children in this country were not reported to the authorities.'

Given the Cloyne Report's allegations about the effect of one letter from the Vatican, the Governmental comments about that claim and allegations of Vatican interference in the development of the Cloyne Report, and the subsequent parliamentary censure of the Vatican, it is entirely natural that the Vatican response focuses, in the main, on those claims. The Irish Government made very serious allegations about the Vatican. It's hardly surprising that the Vatican's response is a rebuttal of those charges.


3. Why doesn't it say more about abuse and cover-up in Cloyne?
Why would it? The letter's a response to a demand from the Irish Government for an explanation about the Vatican's own actions; it's not a response to a demand for a comment on the behaviour of Irish clergy.

The Vatican takes pains in the response to avoid interfering in the business of the Irish State, and as such properly refrains from commenting on the detail of matters which may yet come before the Irish courts. Having said that, it utterly condemns the abuse of children by Irish clergy, is unambiguous in its condemnation of the failures of John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan to follow either the Irish bishops' agreed child-protection policies or the universal rules of the Church as a whole, and expresses deep sorrow for abuse committed by Irish clerics, and for the suffering undergone by their victims.

Pundits and politicians wittering and whinging about how 'the Vatican just doesn't get it' are themselves missing the point. The Vatican was asked for an explanation of why it allegedly interfered in and obstructed Irish matters, and it has given such an explanation. Anything else is completely off-topic. This response is very much to the point.


4. Okay, well, what exactly are the issues the Vatican's addressing?
A few things, really, all of them being concrete and clearly defined.

• The Cloyne Report's claim that in a 1997 letter the Vatican refused the Irish bishops' request that their 1996 Framework Document be granted  formal recognition and given the status of Canon Law (4.21).
• The Cloyne Report's claim that the Vatican letter undermined the Irish bishops' Framework Document by describing it as a 'study document' (1.18, 4.21).
• The Cloyne Report's claim that the Vatican's  letter greatly strengthened the position of those in the Irish Church who were opposed to the implementation of the Framework Document, and encouraged them in their opposition to it (1.76, 4.22, 4.91).
• The Tánaiste's claim that 'the Vatican intervened to effectively have priests believe they could in conscience evade their responsibilities under Irish law'.
• The Taoiseach's claim that, 'for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse [the Cloyne Report] exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.' 
• The Taoiseach's implication that the Pope takes the view that the Church is not bound by the standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy.
• The Taoiseach's claim that the Vatican responded to evidence from Cloyne abuse victims in a way that was legalistic rather than sympathetic.
• The Dáil motion that deplored the Vatican’s intervention as contributing to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish Bishops.

5. Didn't Enda also accuse the Vatican of downplaying and managing the rape and torture of children in order to uphold the power and reputation of the Church?
He did, yes. The Vatican's response doesn't directly address this, as it's a very broad and vague claim, and one which is in no way supported by the Cloyne Report. I don't see how it could have been addressed head-on without escalating matters further; it seems to me from reading the Vatican's response that the Vatican is in fact pulling its punches, stopping short of pointing out the clear fact that the Cloyne Report, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, and the Dáil had all, in effect, made claims against the Vatican that would under other circumstances constitute defamation under Irish law.

That said, the response points out that during the period covered by the Cloyne Report, the Vatican received no evidence of abuse in Cloyne until 2005, when one case was submitted to Rome (21.40), with the effect that the offending priest was barred from exercising his priestly ministry (21.62); he has since, of course, been given an eighteen-month suspended sentence by the Irish State. Since then, a few cases have been referred to Rome in 2009, but as no decision on these cases had been made at the time the Report had been drawn up, the Report didn't comment on the Vatican's handling of them in any sense; Enda could hardly have had them in mind when he made his claims about how the Vatican responded to abuse allegations from Cloyne. Implicitly, then, by showing how the only abuse case handled in full by the Vatican while the Murphy Commission was investigating Cloyne had resulted in the barring of a priest from acting as one, the response demonstrates the absurdity of the Taoiseach's claim.

What's more, the response details at length, in sections entitled 'Church legislation on child protection', 'Circular Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (3 May 2011)', and 'Specific attention to the situation in Ireland: the Letter of Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland (2010)', the constructive steps the Vatican has taken to address the problem of child abuse by clergy, steps that can hardly be dismissed as attempts to downplay abuse.

If the 2002 SAVI figures are accurate, over a quarter of Irish adults are survivors of child sexual abuse, with roughly one adult in 240 having been abused by a priest. This is a horrifying reality, and is something we all need to work together to fight. By effectively turning the other cheek in response to the most vicious of the Taoiseach's allegations, the Vatican is declining the opportunity to exacerbate the situation by replying in the polemical manner the Taoiseach's calumnies deserve; instead it's giving everybody a chance to lower their arms and work together to protect and help Irish children.


6. Right. Well, why didn't the Vatican grant the Irish bishops' request that their 1996 Framework Document be granted  formal recognition and given the status of Canon Law?
For two reasons, basically, the first of which was that the Irish bishops didn't ask for it to be granted such recognition, and the second of which was that the Vatican felt that such recognition wasn't necessary, given the unanimous support of the Irish bishops for the new guidelines and the ability of each bishop to implement the guidelines within their own dioceses.

There's more to it than that, but that's the essence of it. You'll note that the Cloyne Report got this wrong, by the way. It expressly states that the Irish bishops sought recognition for the guidelines, when they did no such thing. As I've said before, the report is far from being a perfect document.


7. Well, why did the Vatican describe the Framework Document as a 'study document'? 
Because that's basically what it was. It was presented to Rome as a step towards a formal legislative process, due to be published not by the Irish bishops but by an advisory committee for the bishops. It was as a step towards a formal legislative process that the Vatican commented on it. The Congregation for Clergy had already played a part in the creation of the Framework Document, and it most certainly did not reject the guidelines, let alone bar the Irish bishops from applying them. On the contrary, it merely expressed some concerns about the guidelines, which were obviously in need of being field-tested, and warned against the implementation of the guidelines in such a way that could later lead to the overturning -- on procedural grounds -- of disciplinary decisions.


8. Isn't it true, though, that the 1997 letter encouraged those who were opposed to the guidelines?
It doesn't seem to have done. It's not even clear how widely disseminated this letter was; the Cloyne Report describes it as a strictly confidential letter to the Irish bishops (4.21), and gives no indication that it ever passed beyond the bishops themselves

In any case, whatever the Irish government may say, the Vatican is right to say that there is not a jot of evidence in the Cloyne Report that supports its claim that the Vatican's 1997 reservations about the Irish bishops' 1996 child-protection guidelines had any impact whatsoever on the implementation of those guidelines in Cloyne or any other diocese. I'd challenge anyone who doubts this to trawl through the Cloyne Report in search of any evidence for this hugely damaging and -- I believe -- false allegation. The nearest thing the report offers in support of its claim is a scornful 2008 quotation from Denis O'Callaghan about how the Irish bishops had expected Rome to endorse a wholly separate 2005 document.


9. But what about the Tánaiste's claim that the Vatican convinced priests they could in conscience evade their responsibilities under Irish law?
What responsibilities? What law? You can't evade things that don't exist.

Up until 1997, the failure to report a felony was but a misdemeanour in Irish law, and it was removed from Irish law altogether by April 1997's Criminal Law Act, which created the new offence of 'concealing an offence', applicable only when someone has been bribed to conceal an offence. Of the fifteen members of the current cabinet, nine had been members of the government that introduced that Act, five -- including the Taoiseach -- as full ministers and members of the cabinet, and four -- including the  Tánaiste -- as ministers of state.

It is true that the Congregation for Clergy had reservations about the Framework Document's requirement that any allegations of abuse -- or even concerns expressed about the possibility of such -- should be reported to the State, but given that the Irish Government itself decided over the course of 1996 and 1997 against the introduction of mandatory reporting, I don't see that there's any evidence that the attitude of the Congregation for Clergy in 1997 was any different from that of Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton, Michael Noonan, Brendan Howlin, or Ruairi Quinn.


10. So aside from the fact that that claim is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, it's got no basis whatsoever, as you can't undermine something that's not there?
Exactly.

For what it's worth, time and again throughout the Vatican's response, it stresses the need for the Irish Church to cooperate with the laws of the Irish State, how bishops have never been impeded from reporting cases of abuse to the State, and how bishops were explicitly told in 1998 never to obstruct in any way the course of civil justice. Indeed, it's a basic principle of Church teaching that all Catholics are obliged to obey all just laws of the State in which they live.

(Obviously, some states have blatantly unjust laws, and Catholics are most certainly not bound to obey them. Have a think about things that, say, Idi Amin's government or Pol Pot's came up with and you'll understand why the Church doesn't demand that Catholics obey the law regardless of what it might be.)


11. What about Enda's claim that the Cloyne Report exposed -- for the first time ever -- an attempt within the last three years by the Vatican to frustrate an official Irish inquiry?
Well, as I said at the time, that was clearly nonsense, and the Vatican's pointed that out. The Cloyne Report in no way criticises the Vatican for a failure to cooperate with it, reserving its sole criticisms in that regard for the State. With reference to the Papal Nuncio, it says he told the Commission that he held no documents that would be of use to it, but that the Diocese, which held all documents, would be obliged to cooperate fully; the Report says it did just that, even supplying all privileged communications.

I'll come back to this tomorrow, as Archbishop Martin has asked the Taoiseach to explain his public allegation, and the Taoiseach has responded with a self-refuting ball of bluster. In the meantime, this fellow nails what really happened: the Taoiseach lied to the Dáil. 


12. And the Taoiseach's implication that the Pope didn't regard the Church as needing to operate in line with the standards of civil society?
As the Vatican points out, the passage the Taoiseach quoted was one about theological methodology, basically saying that theological truth isn't a matter of passing fashion, and as such cannot be determined by opinion polls or focus groups or even the collective views of groups of academics. It had nothing to do with Church governance or canon law or anything other than theology, as I explained back in the day.


13. It sounds like the Taoiseach has tried to mislead the Dáil in more than one way, so. And with success. What of his line about the Vatican responding to allegations of abuse not with sympathy, but with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer?
I think this is very unfair on the canon lawyers, who are just trying to ensure the rules are followed. More to the point, though, I covered this above, at point 5, and back in the day, at point 31 of a very long post on the Cloyne Report in general. Given that the report details only one instance of abuse that had been dealt with by Rome, that being submitted to them in 2005 with the complainant being believed and the accused priest being barred from exercising any priestly ministry, there's simply no evidence on which the Taoiseach could base such a claim.


14. That leaves us with the Dáil motion, deploring the Vatican’s intervention as contributing to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish Bishops. How does the Vatican respond to that?
Well,  we've basically covered this too, at point 8 above. The Dáil deplored the effect of the Vatican's 1997 letter, but as we've seen, there's nothing in the Cloyne Report that hints at the letter having had any effect at all. The Report shows Denis O'Callaghan as having openly viewed the Framework Document with contempt, but it doesn't cite him as drawing on the Vatican's letter in support of his views, and indeed, it makes it clear that he was as opposed to implementing canon law as he was the Irish bishops' own guidelines.


15. Okay. I've heard people claiming that in this response, Rome is trying to localise the problem, to say it's nothing to do with the Vatican, and that it's an Irish problem. Is there any truth to that?
The fact is that contrary to popular belief, the Church is incredibly decentralised, with most decisions being taken at the lowest possible level. This shouldn't really surprise us: given that the Vatican's operating budget isn't a lot more than half that of University College Dublin, it can hardly be expected to micromanage things. In practice, as the Ferns Report explained back in the day and the Vatican's response spells out, dioceses have a huge degree of autonomy, to an extent to which one might almost hold that every bishop is Pope in his own diocese. Almost.

The point being: it's impossible to analyse these issues fairly unless we understand just how localised the Church is. Indeed, the Irish Church has more than 180 separate parts, and there's nothing remotely resembling a clear chain of command in Ireland, leading everything back to Rome. It's very clear that Magee and O'Callaghan did their own thing in Cloyne, and nobody in Rome was any the wiser until the Elliott Report brought their mismanagement of affairs to light. That, of course, was promptly followed by a debate over whether Magee should step down, with him being unwilling to do so until he had a meeting with the Nuncio, after which he requested that he be relieved of duty.

Yes, I know these localised problems appear to have happened everywhere, both in terms of the abuse itself and of mismanagement of abuse. This does not mean that the mismanagement was in any way centralised, though. If anything, it seems that it was something that arose naturally from clericalist cultures and the natural tendency of people to trust and look after those with whom they have close ties. What Benedict seems to have been trying to do from Rome is to find a centralised way of short-circuiting the all-too-common local tendency towards clericalist mismanagement.

There are those who don't like Rome having an influence on how the Irish Church runs things, but given the hames the Irish Church has made of dealing with clerical abuse, I don't see that we should be looking for an exclusively Irish solution to an Irish problem.

And child abuse -- let's not beat about the bush -- is most definitely an Irish problem. 


More tomorrow, with particular reference to the Taoiseach's claims. And sorry I've been slow with this. I've been away, and I've been very busy at my own work, it being at a crucial stage, and in terms of this I've been trying to get a handle on the original nature of the Irish request, the text of the response, and the governmental and media reactions at home.