The statutory inquiry into clerical abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese may be broken up into sections and published over several months.The report, which will be presented to government this week, is understood to have been divided into 46 ‘compartments’, each dealing with a separate clerical abuser.
This would permit the government to delay publishing any individual section if one of the clerics brought a legal challenge.
Justice minister Dermot Ahern will seek advice from the Attorney General and is expected to publish the report later this summer.
Three of the 46 clerics whose cases were examined by the inquiry team are currently facing charges before the courts.
It is understood that the government can withhold publication of any of the three standalone sections relating to each of these men if there is a risk of prejudicing criminal trials.
The three cases are not expected to be concluded before early 2010.
One of the three men, due for trial next April, is a laicised former cleric who was considered to have been one of the most prolific child sex abusers in the archdiocese.
The report will note that, despite regular complaints to senior clergy, the man systematically abused children as young as nine over a six-year period in one of Dublin’s poorest parishes where, in 1986, he was put in charge of special children’s Masses. He was later moved to a city-centre parish where he continued in active ministry.
In each parish where he served between the late 1970s and early 1990s, he was the subject of complaints by parents and community workers.
Neither the former priest nor the parishes in which he served before being laicised can be named, due to the criminal charges he faces.
The report covers allegations of abuse against 46 priests based in the archdiocese between 1975 and 2004, during the period when Dermot Ryan, Kevin McNamara and Desmond Connell were Archbishops of Dublin.
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said the forthcoming report contains ‘‘a litany of the worst imaginable abuse and recurring sexual assault’’.
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