WHAT Barry Andrews describes euphemistically as "the deficit in trust" still existing in the notification and reporting of child sexual abuse allegations to the gardai and the HSE by Catholic Church authorities is personified in one bishop -- John Magee of Cloyne. The official State report published yesterday by the Minister for Children is even more damaging for the standing, credibility and integrity of the former secretary to three successive Popes than the previously damning investigation by the Church's own independent watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children. (NBSC).
Indeed, without the trenchant digging of the Board's chief executive, Ian Elliott, in exposing "significantly deficient" handling by Bishop Magee of complaints of sexual abuse made by five people against two priests in his diocese, the Government, the Church and the Irish public would not have had these breaches of trust confirmed in yesterday's report.
Amazingly, however, even with the evidence supplied by Mr Elliott that children were placed at risk of further harm in Bishop Magee's Cloyne, the HSE proposed to give him, along with all other dioceses, a clean bill of health.
Rightly, Mr Andrews has persuaded Brian Cowen's Government to throw this appallingly bad judgment by the HSE into 'the sin bin' and has decided to order the Commission of Inquiry into the Archdiocese of Dublin to extend its work into the way child protection procedures have operated in Cloyne.
This decision, which goes a long way to redressing Mr Andrews's own apparent slowness in acting on the findings obtained from Mr Elliott as far back as last July, marks him out as a politician of a younger generation that is no longer prepared to tug the forelock in the presence of Lord Bishops.
In upholding the supremacy of the State above the Altar through its agencies of the gardai and the HSE, Mr Andrews must now exercise political firmness is ensuring that the HSE in particular becomes more transparent and accountable to Government in its protection of children, especially in schools under the patronage of bishops.
Mr Andrews showed he has the mettle to do so in the forthright manner of his rejection of the HSE opinion that a referral of Bishop Magee's singular conduct to the Dublin Commission was not warranted.
Had he followed this advice from such an unwieldy body that is low in public confidence, Mr Andrews would today be being savaged for dereliction of civic duty and his promising career would have become enshrouded in the stormy clouds that now darken Bishop Magee's future residence in Cloyne.
Never before in the history of the State has an Irish politician publicly confronted a Bishop with 'discrepancies' in information on child protection which he supplied to the HSE. 'Discrepancies' in an Irish ecclesiastical context is now an Andrews euphemism for what a noted British civil servant once famously called being "economical with the truth"!
In contradiction to the anonymous opinion-maker in the HSE, Mr Andrews asserted that the evidence in the Cloyne review "points to the fact that Bishop Magee, as the responsible person, did not faithfully report actual compliance with child protection procedures and the manner in which clerical sexual abuse allegations have been dealt with".
The minister's ensuing list of wrong, misleading or evasive information in Bishop Magee's questionnaire responses must surely warrant Rome defrocking him of his Episcopal robes, if he does not now renounce his mitre and crozier by announcing his resignation. His position was untenable after the Elliott Report. It is now torpedoed by the Government's sending the Dublin Commission to investigate his diocesan household practices.
Bishop Magee has lost all pastoral and administrative respect.
It will be difficult for him to walk into any Catholic national school under his patronage with such a cloud hanging over him. He has been singled out as the only Irish bishop in the post-Ferns Inquiry environment who has not conformed to its new orthodoxy that "it is unacceptable that full and faithful reporting of child sexual abuse allegations should not take place".
While some other bishops may be lucky to have their past errors exonerated by a flabby HSE, and are now turning for advice to Mr Elliott's board, Mr Andrews has recognised the weakness in post-Ferns procedures under Article five which requires 'soft' information regarding rumours or suspicions of child abuse to be shared by bishops with the gardai and the HSE.
The Constitutional requirement of a suspect person to his or her good name is an issue with which Mr Andrews agrees with the Episcopal Conference led by Cardinal Brady and Archbishop Martin. Close working relations between Government and Episcopacy can lead to the finding of a legislative solution which will enable the minister to obtain information which has been withheld by the Church.
If it was a day of damnation for Bishop Magee, it was on the whole a day of vindication for the leadership shown by Cardinal Brady and Archbishop Martin in making child clerical sexual abuse the number one sin in the Irish Church.
The positive steps that the Catholic Church has taken to put in place robust child protection practices throughout the country has been acknowledged by the Government through Mr Andrews. The steps that Mr Andrews announced yesterday do offer the Catholic Church in Ireland the opportunity to comprehensively address "the deficit in trust".
An essential step in that restoration of trust must be the departure of Bishop Magee and the appointment of a successor who will give the now shamed diocese of Cloyne a fresh start.
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(Source: II)