STORMONT is under pressure to set up two investigations into child
sex abuse by Catholic priests – and possibly others – in Northern
Ireland.
Jim Wells, who is to take over as health minister in two
years, warns that Northern Ireland has been “sleeping” about the level
of abuse which has taken place north of the border.
Some of the
stories which survivors of abuse have taken to MLAs in an attempt to
convince them of the horrific nature of their suffering show that the
abuse has been “much worse than even what was happening in the
Republic”, the DUP MLA has told the News Letter.
Mr Wells said that “if ten per cent of what we hear is true then we are in for gruesome hearings”.
If
victims’ allegations prove to be correct, he said that “we have had a
cesspit of abuse going on, sometimes in the leafy suburbs of Belfast”.
And, pointing to the urgency of the situation, he added: “Some of the priests are still alive.”
Unlike
inquiries into Troubles-related events, there is understood to be a
fairly broad political consensus about the need for Stormont to
undertake an investigation into the scale and nature of abuse in
Northern Ireland.
However, despite cross-party support, the
process is taking a considerable time, something which politicians say
is important to ensure that the terms of the inquiry are properly
thought through.
Stormont has agreed to set up an inquiry into
‘institutional abuse’ — that is, abuse which occurred in institutions
set up to care for orphaned or otherwise needy children in Northern
Ireland.
In a statement released earlier this month, Peter
Robinson and Martin McGuinness said that the executive had held “a wide
ranging discussion on the report of the Interdepartmental Taskforce on
Historical Institutional Abuse” but no decision would be taken on how to
proceed until “early autumn”.
However, clerical abuse – that is,
individual priests who abused children within parishes – is a more
difficult issue to address. Unlike many of the children in institutions,
most of those believed to have been abused within what were often
small, tightly-knit communities have been more reluctant to speak up
about abuse which in some cases they have attempted to forget.
There
is a second, political, challenge to setting up an inquiry into
clerical abuse at parish level: most of the Catholic dioceses straddle
the border.
The SDLP’s Conall McDevitt, who has led the political
campaign for wide-ranging inquiries into both institutional and clerical
abuse, said that Stormont should agree to work with Dublin on an
inquiry.
He argues that such a decision is a very obvious issue
for the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC) to take forward as it is a
serious issue which must be addressed on both sides of the border.
“You’d need to have a seamless process that crosses over and back and
more or less is invisible to the border,” he said.
And he said
that the issue has united unionists and nationalists as using the
north-south body as it is the most straightforward way “to deal with
something that is very obviously an all-island problem”.
Mr Wells said that he had “no problem at all” with the NSMC looking into what is “clearly a non-political” issue.
Ulster
Unionist deputy leader John McCallister said that Northern Ireland’s
inquiry now needed to have a broader remit, given what has been revealed
in the Cloyne Report.
He said the fact that in the Republic
sexual abuse was still being covered up by the Catholic Church three
years ago means that the executive has a duty to ensure that children in
Northern Ireland are protected.
He said: “It’s such a huge issue,
I think it’s going to be difficult for the executive not to broaden
that [institutional] inquiry out.”
Mr McCallister said that the
Catholic church, not taxpayers, should fund the majority of the inquiry
costs, and added: “I think there’s a huge moral imperative on the church
to be frank and honest and open, and work with the inquiry.”
However,
Michael Kelly, deputy editor of The Irish Catholic newspaper, has
cautioned MLAs about the need to be sensitive to Catholic fears that
they are being singled out.
“If this is an inquiry into
institutional abuse in Catholic institutions in the north, I think that
will be a very bad move because it will lend itself to the view among
northern Catholics that they are being singled out,” he said.
“Other
churches and indeed the state ran institutions, so I think an inquiry
should cover all of those if there is to be any level of fairness.
“It was easier in the Republic where the overwhelming majority of the institutions were run by the church.”