The Irish archbishop who gave the Government 70,000 Church documents
concerning clergy sexual abuse of minors said he was concerned that the
presentation of a recent report by Ireland's child safety watchdog might
discourage the Church's child protection workers.
Dublin
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said he was concerned that the National
Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church presented its
report May 11 by emphasising negative things, not the progress being
made.
"I'm actually worried that the manner in which the National Board
decided to present as their primary dimension of their report, negative
aspects, will have damaged -- not the credibility of the bishops, but
the confidence of the people who are working in the diocese like mine."
After the discovery of thousands of cases of clergy sexual abuse,
most of them from the 20th Century, thousands of volunteers were trained
in child protection, and each Dublin parish now has someone monitoring
the situation.
"If they (volunteers) feel that their time is being wasted, when in
fact it isn't, I think that could be damaging," Archbishop Martin told
Catholic News Service May 16.
At a Dublin news conference presenting the board's third annual
report, Ian Elliott, chief executive of the Safeguarding Board,
expressed frustration about getting information from Church officials,
although he acknowledged that concerns over data protection had been
resolved.
Archbishop Martin told CNS he was disappointed that the board
presented concern over data protection as "a form of obstructionism on
the part of the bishops, the religious and the Irish Missionary Union."
The board, set up in 2006, was established as one step removed from
the Church to give it independence, but that meant it was a third party.
Archbishop Martin said it was actually the board's lawyers that
discovered this created a problem.
Data protection
"Irish data protection law doesn't allow you to pass sensitive
personal data to third parties," he said.
"We had to find -- and it took
a long time -- to find a formula which would permit us to do that in
certain circumstances, but it places heavy restrictions on all parties
about revealing identities. This means that carrying out the review (of
abuse cases) has been delayed, and the review will inevitably be
unsatisfactory because of the restrictions that are placed -- not by the
bishops or the religious or by the board -- but by the law.
"In the case of immediate and direct risk to children, data protection measures don't apply," he added.
He also expressed concern that the board's report indicated that it
had had problems receiving information from the bishops within the past
year.
"Every known allegation in the past year had been adequately
presented to the police and to the health service," Archbishop Martin
said, adding that "this is enormous progress compared to the past."
He
said he thought it was more important that allegations be presented to
the competent authorities than to the Safeguarding Board.
The archbishop called "a gross misrepresentation of the truth" a
report that Elliott's board launched a new training program and the
bishops refused to finance it.
The bishops decided each diocese should pay for training, "which I
believe is a more effective way of doing it," he said, adding that they
also provided a financial administrator to help manage the training.