The proposal by the Government to force priests to break the Seal of Confession is “one of the daftest ideas to come out in recent years,” according to one of the country’s leading barristers.Mr Paul Anthony McDermott, an expert on criminal law said on RTÉ’s Frontline programme on Monday that the idea of breaking the seal of confession made little sense when confession is “anonymous; you don't have to give your name, you don't give your address, you don't give your PPS number.”
He added, “So if that law was passed as it is, it would almost certainly be found unconstitutional, because the first thing a court would say to the Government is, why are you breaking the seal of confession for child abuse, but not murder?
“So if you're going to put forward a law, you have to put it forward on a rational basis.”
“There's no suggestion in any of the reports that the confessional was the problem, and therefore another problem the Government would have if there was a constitutional challenge is trying to explain why it has challenged one of the most serious principles of the Catholic faith in circumstances where no problem has been identified.”
He added that he didn't understand, “why the politicians who put forward the idea are now running to suggest this is irrelevant to the debate.”
He said, “How can it be irrelevant if you're going to create a criminal offence tomorrow saying to priests if you don't pass on what you hear in the confessional, you're a criminal, you're going to jail.”
“So you can't put forward a proposal like that and then say, “Oh, this is irrelevant to the debate.”
He concluded, “For most people, this is central to the debate and the real problem with the law is, and at some point Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald are going to realise this, I think it's going to be an interesting political experiment to see how many weeks it takes them to realise it, people aren't going to support this measure.”
Meanwhile, also speaking on Frontine, Justice Catherine McGuinness, and one of the first people to advocate mandatory reporting of child abuse, as one of the authors of the Kilkenny incest report, said that her report team never considered the issue of the seal “because it didn't seem to create a problem, it was an irrelevance.”
She said that since the Government weren't going to mention the Seal of Confession in the legislation, she believed that the Constitutional provision relating to the protection of religious freedom would protect the seal.