Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said children who were abused by priests must be remembered during any criticisms of the Murphy report.
He
said every cleric of the Dublin Archdiocese “who engaged with the
Murphy commission was offered legal assistance for preparation, during
their engagement, or when verifying drafts submitted to the commission
for factual accuracy”.
His statement was issued following the publication in The Irish Times
of details of a review of the Murphy report commissioned by the
Association of Catholic Priests and presented at their agm in Athlone.
It was carried out by barrister Fergal Sweeney, who served as principal magistrate in Hong Kong and on the district court there before retirement in 2005 .
The
review found that the practices and procedures of the Murphy commission
“fell far short” of meeting the requirements of natural and
constitutional justice where Catholic clergy called before it were
concerned.
‘Veered off the rails’
‘Veered off the rails’
It concluded that the commission “veered off the tight rails imposed by the 2004 Commissions of Investigation Act and wandered into an adversarial arena that concentrated, to an alarming degree, on ‘naming and shaming’ those clerics whom the Commission found wanting in child protection at that time”.
Archbishop Martin
said that, to his knowledge, the commission had no objection to priests
or diocesan officials being accompanied by their lawyers in their
engagements with it.
“Any person who had a difficulty with the fairness
of procedure adopted by the commission had the right to challenge those
procedures by way of a judicial review in the High Court. ”
Acknowledging
the right of anyone to “examine or criticise the fairness of an act of
legislation”, Dr Martin said “one should never overlook the context
which gave rise to the establishment of the Murphy report – that a
strikingly large number of children were sexually abused by priests
within the church of Jesus Christ”.
He said
“anyone who loves the church must be truly saddened by this fact. The
children who were abused and their families and dear ones must be
uppermost in our minds”.
He added that “the Murphy
report concerned itself with a representative sample of abuse cases. To
date, the Diocesan Child Safeguarding and Protection Service (CSPS),
and the civil authorities, have allegations of abuse recorded against 98
priests. The CSPS has information that over 500 children may have been
abused by priests in Dublin”.
He concluded: “As I
said on the publication of the Murphy report in 2009, the fact that the
abusers were priests constituted both an offence to God and an affront
to the priesthood. The many good priests of the archdiocese share my
sense of shame. This is and remains the case in 2013.”