THERE WERE “real issues” around the failure of the Catholic hierarchy
to co-operate with the church’s own child protection review, the
Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said Thursday night.
In January
2009 the Irish Catholic Bishops, the Conference of Religious of Ireland
(Cori) and the Irish Missionary Union (IMU) asked their own child
protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children
(NBSC), to undertake a review of all church institutions in Ireland.
It
followed an NBSC report on Cloyne diocese, published the previous
month, which found child protection practices there to be “inadequate
and in some respects dangerous”.
It prompted the Government in early
January 2009 to extend the remit of the Murphy commission to investigate
the handling of clerical child abuse allegations in Cloyne.
Its report
is expected shortly.
“Data protection issues are real issues,”
Archbishop Martin said last night, and that where the review was
concerned “the whole question of the legality [of passing on such data
by church authoritie] was raised by lawyers for the NBSC,” he said.
“There
is a real problem with passing on such [sensitive] information to
non-statutory third parties, especially in Northern Ireland. Fines under
British data protection legislation are enormous,” he said.
Lawyers for
church authorities and the NBSC had now worked out how there could be
co-operation in such a review, he said, but he could understand NBSC
chief executive Ian Elliott’s frustration with the length of time this
had taken.
They “found a way out that leaves the bishop or religious
superior in the driving seat” when it came to the provision of such
information, he said.
In its annual report for the year ended
March 31st, 2011, published on Wednesday, the NBSC said that until
recently it was prevented from undertaking the review requested, by
legal concerns on the part of church authorities.
It also
disclosed that funding for the board’s training programmes in child
protection, requested by church authorities, was withdrawn by the church
last October, and that 219 new allegations of clerical child abuse made
to the church authorities were withheld from the board until recently.
Where
funding for training was concerned, Archbishop Martin said that, rather
than costs for this coming from the NBSC budget, it was decided that
those who availed of such training should be billed for it.
He
could not explain why over three-quarters of the 272 new allegations
received by church authorities in the year to March 31st last had not
been passed on to the NBSC until the last minute.
“Perhaps the NBSC
should be in greater contact with the dioceses or superiors,” he
suggested.