The Dáil is to debate the Cloyne report on the handling of clerical sex abuse next week.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore told the House today that it would be held on either Tuesday or Wednesday.
“The
Government is quite happy to have it agreed by the whips and to make
the necessary time available," he said. “I share, and the Government
shares, the sense of outrage that there is about the findings of this
report."
The report, said Mr Gilmore, was part of a sequence of
similar reports. “What is involved here is a betrayal, a betrayal of
trust, of the children first of all, who were abused, not supported,
ignored, a betrayal of the trust Irish people and society, over a very
long time, placed in particular in the Catholic Church and its
institutions in all of their dealings with children,” he added.
Mr Gilmore said it was an issue the Government intended dealing with effectively.
Outlining
legislative measures to be introduced, the Tánaiste said they would
deal with the withholding of information, the setting up of a national
vetting bureau and placing the revised children first national
guidelines on a statutory basis.
Fianna Fáil’s Eamon Ó Cuív said
there was a feeling of anger and disgust following the report.
“There is
no politician who can add to the testimony of the victims in this
particular situation,” he said.
Sinn Féin’s Mary Lou McDonald said
the report represented another chapter in the sordid story of the
violation of children and the sheltering of abused perpetrators by the
church.
“I think it needs to be recognised in this House that, to date,
the State has failed children," she added.
Joe Higgins of the
Socialist Party said Bishop John Magee, who was at the heart of the
report, was also at the heart of the Vatican bureaucracy for so long.
This, he added, went some way to explain “the Omerta-like code of
silence” in protecting those abusing children at enormous expense to
them and society.