The Catholic Church in Ireland is facing a difficult year, if the past ten days are anything to go by.The decision last week by Minister for Children Barry Andrews to ask an inquiry team to examine the handling of clerical abuse complaints in the Cork diocese of Cloyne followed the revelation that the diocese had failed to report clerical abuse allegations to the HSE.
Bishop John Magee told gardaí in December 2005 about a complaint of abuse dating back to the early 1980s against a priest dubbed ‘Fr W’.
He breached agreed childcare guidelines established after the 2005 Ferns Inquiry by failing separately to tell the HSE about the case.
Magee told a team of HSE auditors that he made a genuine mistake. The long-awaited HSE audit into the handling of complaints made in each of the country’s Catholic dioceses, published last Tuesday, showed there were four allegations of abuse against clerics in Cloyne diocese which Magee had also not told the HSE about.
In each of these cases, Magee informed gardaí about the allegation. He did not conceal the information from the state authorities. In each case, the Director of Public Prosecutions examined files relating to the complaints.
The bishop told the HSE’s audit team last November that his mistake was a simple one. He said that he believed that, once he had informed the gardaí about the alleged abuse, they would pass the information onto the HSE.
Crucially, it has emerged, the Garda Síochána also failed to inform the HSE. It was only when the Fr W case was highlighted by the victims’ advocacy group One In Four that the HSE became aware of the allegation.
According to the recommendations of the Ferns report, the gardaí and the HSE must work closely together.
Last week, Andrews published the HSE’s first audit of dioceses nationwide, which asked bishops to complete an eight-page questionnaire which was then reviewed by childcare specialists.
The audit into Cloyne was given special attention when it emerged that Magee had failed to inform the HSE directly about abuse cases, and contradicted himself by claiming in January 2007 that he had told them everything.
But after reviewing new procedures in Cloyne at the end of 2008, the HSE’s audit team gave Cloyne and all the other dioceses a clean bill of health when it delivered its final report to Andrews’s office on December 4.
HSE childcare managers accepted guarantees from all senior Catholic clergy in charge of dioceses nationwide that they were committed to fulfilling the requirements of Children First, the national child welfare guidelines agreed in 2005.
The audits asked bishops nationwide to outline their procedures for handling abuse claims, and compared these to the Children First guidelines.
However, the bishops refused to fill in one of the seven sections of the audit questionnaire which dealt with specifics of abuse cases. As a result, the relevant section 5 was dropped.
In section 5, bishops were asked list the number of clerics convicted of child abuse; the number currently under investigation; the number not deemed reportable by senior clergy; and the number of complaints deemed unfounded by gardaí or the DPP. It also asked a large number of questions relating to the monitoring, movements, residence and treatment of alleged or convicted offenders.
Depending on the interpretation applied to the language used by the HSE last week, in accompanying documents published with the audits, the information gleaned from the HSE’s questionnaires is either useful or useless.
The HSE’s national director of Primary, Community and Continuing Care, Laverne McGuinness, described the seminal audits as ‘‘an invaluable benchmark against which to gauge the compliance of Church authorities collectively and individually.” Her comments were in a letter to the Office of the Minister for Children (OMC) in January 2008, published alongside the audits last week.
But in the same update, the HSE told the minister, Brendan Smith, that it was ‘‘not possible to retrospectively examine the application of procedures’’ applied by bishops, due to their failure to complete section 5 of the questionnaire.
The bishops had received legal advice that there was no legal protection to ensure confidentiality and protection from civil liability if they were sued by an alleged abuser who was ultimately never convicted.
The 2005 Ferns report recommended that such legal protection be established.
The HSE also sought independent legal advice from senior counsel in 2006 about its own potential exposure to civil act ion.
Arising from this advice, the HSE decided that it could not proceed with the interagency committees (comprising gardaí, HSE and religious) recommended in the Ferns report, as they would be exposed to legal liability.
The issue was flagged in a briefing given by HSE chief executive Brendan Drumm to the Minister for Children, Brian Lenihan, in the first update of the audit process in June 2006.
Drumm wrote: ‘‘The risk [is] that any discussion of alleged abuse in which no formal complaint has been made and without reference to the alleged abuser will be seen as a breach of natural justice.”
‘‘In addition, the proposed requirement that the Inter-Agency Committee note and record all allegations of abuse, even where they are demonstrably untrue or made by persons known not to be credible, was likely to give rise to additional legal problems,” he wrote.
If the HSE’s audit process was crucially damaged by the omission of section 5, then major questions exist about the state’s leap of faith, in accepting the guarantees given by the country’s dioceses.
While Andrews has expressed faith that the HSE’s auditors were correct to give the other two dozen dioceses a clean bill of health, he disagreed with their recommendation that Magee had cleansed his sin of omission.
Andrews’ move was prompted by the inconsistencies in Magee’s actions. It was, however, as the minister said, ‘‘a political decision’’ - a comment which, like the HSE’s audits, may be read in several ways.
By referring the diocese of Cloyne to the team probing the handling of abuse allegations in Dublin Archdiocese, Andrews has deflected the ire of government critics who accuse it of failing to legislate to permit access to ‘soft’ information, as recommended by the Ferns report in 2005.
The bishops, HSE and the OMC have been negotiating the complex issue of handling soft information to little avail since 2005.
The Rape Crisis Network of Ireland (RCNI) questioned whether the information sought under section 5 constituted soft information at all, as it was ‘‘largely general and numerical in nature’’.
‘‘No personal information, ‘soft’ or otherwise, was asked for about perpetrators or al leg ed perpetrator s,” said RCNI legal director Caroline Counihan.
One expensive and risky option which would bypass legislation would be for the minister to indemnify the Church and the HSE against any civil action arising from soft information passed to any subsequent audit.
One In Four director Maeve Lewis last week described Andrews’ referral of Cloyne to the Dublin Archdiocese investigation team as ‘‘brave’’.
Andrews said that Judge Yvonne Murphy and her team would take just six months to complete their examination of Cloyne’s compliance with several sets of childcare guidelines going back to 1996.
Admitted errors or not, Magee’s handling of abuse claims has lacked confidence.
He has ensured that there will be one or two more difficult days for the diocese - and the Catholic Church - in 2009.
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(Source: SBP)