TOO little, too late is likely to be the judgment by the Commission of Investigation on how Cardinal Desmond Connell handled clerical child sex abuse allegations during his troubled 16-year reign as Archbishop of Dublin.Plucked in 1988 by Pope John Paul II from his ivory tower at University College Dublin, where he had taught metaphysics for 35 years, Cardinal Connell inherited an insurance scheme to shield the archdiocese financially from escalating abuse compensation claims.
A hugely unpopular Archbishop of Dublin, he found himself at the centre of numerous public controversies -- including providing a glowing job reference to an American diocese on behalf of one priest abuser, and for giving a loan to the convicted paedophile Fr Ivan Payne.
Abuse victims such as Marie Collins and Andrew Madden voiced trenchant criticisms of the Cardinal's handling of their complaints, which they claim prolonged their trauma.
It was not until 1995 that he ordered a trawl through the diocesan secret archives to determine how many clerics had ever been accused of child abuse, and he gave gardai only 17 names.
This compares starkly with how his successor Archbishop Diarmuid Martin later found that since 1940 more than 400 children had claimed to have been abused by at least 152 priests in the Dublin area.
On his retirement in 2004, Cardinal Connell claimed he had become the "lightning rod" for much of the public anger against clerical abusers. But he continued to defend his record, saying he was limited in what he could say because of the pending state investigation.
His one intervention came last year when he sought a High Court application to prevent the examination by the commission of more than 5,000 documents which had been handed over by Archbishop Martin on the grounds that these files were confidential to him. But in the ensuing public clamour against his perceived cover-up, he withdrew the application.
Cardinal Connell gave his evidence in private to the commission.
According to the leaked report, Cardinal Connell was shocked at the extent of child sexual abuse among the Dublin diocesan clergy and religious orders but was slow to recognise the seriousness of the situation.
He also reportedly took poor counsel from legal and medical advisers and failed to realise that clerical sex abusers could not be dealt with in secret.
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