THE CLOYNE report into the handling of clerical child sex abuse in
that mainly Co Cork Catholic diocese, is expected to be published this
week.
Sources indicated last night that this could be on Friday.
Others
said it may be sooner as edits necessary, following a High Court
decision last Friday, are fewer than was the case following a similar
High Court decision where the Murphy report was concerned and prior to
its publication in November 2009.
The period covered by the Cloyne
investigation was from January 1st, 1996, to February 1st, 2009 – the
introduction of the Irish Catholic Church’s first guidelines on child
protection.
The resulting Cloyne report contains 26 chapters, is
approximately 400 pages long, and had included findings on all 19
priests who faced abuse allegations there over the period investigated.
Last
Friday the president of the High Court Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns
decided that parts of chapter nine are not to be published for now
because of pending criminal proceedings against one priest.
The
completed report was presented to then minister for justice Dermot Ahern
on December 23rd last and followed a two-year investigation by the
commission, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, which also investigated the
handling of clerical child sex abuse in the Dublin archdiocese.
The
remit of the Murphy commission was extended to include Cloyne in
January 2009 following publication the previous month on the Cloyne
diocesan website of a report by the Catholic Church’s own child
protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the
Catholic Church in Ireland (NBSC).
It found that child protection
practices in Cloyne were “inadequate and in some respects dangerous”.
It said that in December 2004 a priest there reported to the then Bishop
of Cloyne John Magee that he had been abused as a child.
In May 2005
the priest named his abuser, another priest of the diocese. Four months
later Bishop Magee met the accused, who resigned.
It was not until
November 19th, 2005, six months after the Cloyne authorities were first
made aware of the abuser priest’s name, that gardaí were informed and
then Cloyne only supplied the name of the victim.
Nor were gardaí told
that the accused was also a priest of the diocese.
In another case
the NBSC found that the diocese did not report a case to the gardaí for
eight years after it first received allegations.
This, it said, was
“not exceptional” in Cloyne where it was clear “that the policy of the
diocese in their contacts with the gardaí was to give ‘minimal’
information.”
It also found that meetings convened by the diocese
on child protection were “apparently focused on the needs of the accused
priest” with no documentary evidence that the risk to vulnerable
children was discussed.
Bishop Magee stood aside as Bishop of Cloyne in March 2009 and resigned in March 2010.