PRELATE'S ADDRESS: CATHOLIC ARCHBISHOP of Dublin
Diarmuid Martin has apologised unreservedly to the people of Ballyfermot
in Dublin following the abuse of children there by former priest Tony
Walsh, “and about the way this abuse was hushed up by people with
responsibility in the parish and in the diocese”.
Speaking during
Mass at the Church of the Assumption in Ballyfermot Sunday, he said:
“I came here this morning to renew my apologies to the people of this
parish for the facts that this week have emerged.”
He was
referring to the jailing of Walsh for 16 years last Monday, four
suspended, following his conviction of the sexual abuse of three boys
from Ballyfermot during the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
“I come
to bring my apology to a parish to which I owe much. I grew up here; it
is a parish to which I belonged and to which I feel I still belong. It
is a parish which grew up in hardship, but whose people worked hard and
supported each other and above all gave themselves so that their
children could do well in life. This has been the story of Ballyfermot
for years, as it is today,” he said.
He asked: “How do I explain
to a community marked by such honesty, good neighbourliness and hard
work that the church failed many children of this parish?”
Many of
those who came forward “did not want to damage the church they loved.
They simply wanted abuse to be stopped, effectively and definitively.
Their love of the church was betrayed by leadership in the church,” he
said.
He could not “but recall that in the years in which I lived
in this parish I was exactly at the age of many of the children who were
abused by Tony Walsh and sadly by a number of other priests who worked
in this parish over the years. I apologise unreservedly.”
Looking
back, he said, “I see more clearly that the catastrophic manner in which
the abuse was dealt with was a symptom of a deeper malaise within the
Irish church . . . It had often become self-centred and arrogant . . .
and rarely empathised with the hurt of children.”
The first step
on the road to renewal was for the church to “honestly acknowledge with
no ‘buts’ . . . the gravity and the extent of what happened”, he said.
SIC: IT/IE