PRESSURE ON the five bishops who still hold office and whose handling of clerical child sex abuse was addressed by the Dublin diocesan report increased throughout yesterday.
Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said all bishops implicated in the report should resign immediately. He said those who were in positions of authority in Dublin archdiocese, and who knew what was going on, should no longer continue in such positions.
“This is another appalling litany of shame. Apologies here are not good enough,” he said.
Former Labour Party leader Pat Rabbitte said that any bishop “directly implicated” in the Dublin report “should have no role as a school patron”.
Meanwhile, Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy has ordered Assistant Commissioner John O’Mahoney to commence an investigation into the findings of the report.
The relevant bishops are the Bishop of Limerick, Donal Murray, whose handling of a particular allegation was described as “inexcusable” in the report; Bishop Jim Moriarty of Kildare Leighlin diocese; Bishop Martin Drennan of Galway diocese; and the two Dublin auxiliary bishops, Bishop Ray Field and Bishop Éamonn Walsh.
Speaking at foundation day ceremonies at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin yesterday, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said the story of how the sexual abuse of children was managed in the archdiocese, as shown in the report, “was inexcusable”.
He noted that “regrettably this hospital was also the scene of abuse by at least two chaplains, who exploited their role of representing the care of Jesus for the children at their most vulnerable. Information about that abuse was inexcusably not shared with the hospital authorities, even though the archbishop of the time was also the chairman of the board.”
He pointed out that the Dublin report “drew attention to the need “to clarify exactly what is the role of the HSE in relation to non-familial abusers”.
Yet, he continued, “in the official Government statement yesterday [Thursday] the only reply to such a vital question, some four years after the Ferns report, was to say that it requires ‘further consultation’.”
Responding to the Dublin diocesan report, the Archbishop of Tuam Michael Neary said that “everyone is deeply disgusted and disillusioned by the awfulness of the abuse, the vulnerability of the victims and the betrayal of the sacred trust placed in those who carried out this abuse”.