ON RTÉ RADIO 1’s
This Week programme last Sunday Minister for Justice Alan
Shatter told Gavin Jennings that the Cloyne report would go before the
Cabinet on Tuesday, July 12th, and be published “very shortly
thereafter”.
The Cloyne report was presented to the former
minister, Dermot Ahern, on December 23rd last year and the Murphy
commission (or, to give it its full title, the Commission of
Investigation, Dublin Archdiocese, Catholic Diocese of Cloyne) was wound
up the following week.
So why the delay, of almost seven months,
in bringing the report before Cabinet?
It was received initially by a
government that was keenly aware of being in its death throes and was
seemingly paralysed by this fact.
There was also the complication that
one of the 19 priests investigated by the Murphy commission in Cloyne
has been appearing before the courts on child-abuse charges, meaning
that, for legal reasons, some details of his case cannot be disclosed.
The
present Government inherited this situation when it took office on
March 9th.
On April 8th the report was brought before the president of
the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, who decided that parts of
chapter nine, which deal with the priest referred to above, should not
be published pending the outcome of proceedings in his case.
Since
then there has been much confusion. Lawyers for the priest and lawyers
for the State could not agree on how to interpret the judge’s decision
as to which parts of chapter nine should not be published.
There was
speculation at different times that the lawyers were returning to the
High Court to secure a definitive decision from Mr Justice Kearns, or
that the lawyers had agreed the changes to chapter nine among themselves
and publication would follow within days, or that the lawyers had
decided to await the outcome of the priest’s court appearances.
It went
on.
The result was what Shatter described last Sunday as a delay
in publication due to “a long-drawn-out process of consultation
involving lawyers who had an interest in the matter”.
What we do
know about the Cloyne report is that it contains 26 chapters and is
about 400 pages long, and that it includes findings on all 19 of the
priests who faced abuse allegations there over the 13-year period
investigated.
That period stretched from January 1st, 1996, when the
Catholic Church in Ireland first introduced child-protection guidelines,
to February 1st, 2009.
The genesis of the report was a direction
by the government in January 2009 that the remit of the Murphy
commission, then investigating the Dublin archdiocese, be extended to
include the Cloyne diocese.
This decision followed the previous month’s
publication of a report on the Cloyne diocesan website that found
child-protection practices there to be “inadequate and in some respects
dangerous”.
The report was the result of an investigation by the
Catholic Church’s child-protection watchdog, the National Board for
Safeguarding Children, in 2008.
The board’s findings were shocking, not
least because they illustrated a reckless attitude to child protection
on the part of the then bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who has since
resigned.
The investigation found that Magee, who had been bishop
of Cloyne since 1987, allowed the Catholic Church’s guidelines on child
protection to be ignored in his diocese despite being party to their
introduction in 1996 and to their updating in 2000 and 2005.
It also
found that the diocesan policy when allegations arose was to provide
minimal information to the gardaí and the health authorities.
In
instances where it did provide information to the civil authorities the
diocese named the victim but not the priest alleged to have carried out
the abuse.
According to the church’s watchdog, Magee’s diocese
“failed to act effectively to limit the access to children by
individuals against whom credible allegations of child sexual abuse had
been made”.
The board’s report stated that, following allegations
against a priest, meetings of Cloyne’s child-protection management
committee were “apparently focused on the needs of the accused priest”.
There was “no documentary evidence that the risk to vulnerable children
was discussed or considered at any time”, it said.
When the church
published its report on December 19th, 2008, Alan Shatter, then Fine
Gael’s spokesman on children, described it as “a damning indictment of
the failure on the part of church authorities to implement essential
child-protection procedures”.
It was, he added, “incomprehensible that
10 years after publication of the Children First child-protection
guidelines and after two decades of revelations of clerical sexual
abuse, there remains at the highest levels a pervasive culture of
cover-up and secrecy”.
Prior to the publication of the revelations
in the report, Cloyne’s Case Management Advisory Committee on child
protection threatened the board with legal action.
In a letter to the
watchdog, the committee said: “We shall have no choice but to seek
remedies in either ecclesiastical or secular courts, or both.”
Two
of the letter’s 10 signatories are likely to feature significantly in
the Cloyne report.
They are Msgr Denis O’Callaghan, who was bishop
Magee’s child-protection delegate in Cloyne at the time, and the
solicitor Diarmaid Ó Catháin.
In February 2008 Ó Catháin was the
solicitor for Cardinal Desmond Connell when he attempted in the High
Court to prevent Diarmuid Martin, his successor as Archbishop of Dublin,
handing over documents to the Murphy commission.
At the time the
commission was investigating the handling of clerical child sex abuse
allegations against a sample 46 priests in the Dublin archdiocese.
It
published its Dublin report in November 2009.
Cardinal Connell was
persuaded to drop his High Court action following intervention by the
Catholic primate, Cardinal Seán Brady.
The documents were handed over.