The strut of power gave them a sense they could do whatever they liked, wherever they liked

Nearly a decade ago, the mother of one of the boys abused by the parish priest of Monageer Fr James Grennan told the Pat Kenny Show on RTÉ radio about the priest's funeral in May 1994.

A boy had come to their door with the news of the priest's death. Her son was getting ready for school at the time, but when he heard the news he laughed and said "Thanks be to God, the dirty old bastard is dead." Before the funeral, however, her son took an overdose of medication, and was still ill on the morning when the people of the parish filed up through the church to see the priest's open coffin. His mother told him to stay at home.

She went to the funeral, accompanied by her sister. Just as she was standing at the coffin herself, she looked around. Her son, still sick and weak from his suicide attempt, was staggering up the aisle. He carried on up to the top of the chapel and stood staring into the coffin "just to see was he dead, to make sure". After a while, he turned to his aunt and asked "Can you smell him? Can you get the dirty smell?"

Something was stinking inside the Irish church for decades, but it took a horribly long time for the people in general to get the smell.

It is easy to say that this happened because the Catholic Church and the State masked the stench with sweet perfumes, took a deep breath and savoured the clear, clean air. Too easy, perhaps. For ordinary, decent people held their noses too. The Ferns Report tells us very clearly how the institutions behaved. But you have to read it very carefully to get a sense of the social context in which church and State could act as they did.

The church certainly used its power to protect the abusers. In the case of James Grennan, his bishop Brendan Comiskey didn't just turn a blind eye to his cynical exploitation of children, he put the power of the church, and by implication of Jesus Christ, behind Grennan's good name. He knew in June 1988 that the then South Eastern Health Board had investigated complaints that Grennan had molested 10 girls aged between 12 and 13 on the very altar where he performed the most sacred rites of the church. Comiskey knew that those complaints had been found to be credible.

Yet, without meeting any of the children or their families, or discussing the case with anyone other than his own vicar general and Grennan himself, he decided that the priest was innocent. And he made this clear in the most public and symbolic way possible. He stood with Grennan on the altar at Monageer for the Confirmation of the very children who had been abused. When two families walked out and children began to cry, he neither saw the walkout nor heard the cries. He denied to the Wexford People at the time that the walkout happened. He told the Ferns inquiry that the Confirmation ceremony was "a very joyful, happy, sunny summer day". The State acted with more good will but little more effectiveness. The South Eastern Health Board's Dr Geraldine Nolan interviewed seven of the girls (the parents of the other three refused to co-operate) and concluded that they had been abused and that they and other children had to be protected from Grennan. But the board then did essentially nothing to protect or counsel the children.

The Garda received a copy of Dr Nolan's report. Supt Vincent Smith asked the local garda in Monageer, Donal Behan, to interview the girls who were making the allegations. He did so, accompanied by another garda and a sergeant. Before these statements could be typed or copied, however, they were taken by the superintendent. He told the inquiry that he passed them on to Chief Supt James Doyle, who read them without comment and passed them back. Chief Supt Doyle told the inquiry that he never saw the statements at all. Either way, the outcome was clear: the statements disappeared and no action was taken. Garda Behan told the inquiry that "I concluded at the time that it was just quashed and that was it." But a collusive church and a toothless State were in turn facilitated by those among the public who were either too much in awe of their religious masters to ask questions or who actively sacrificed the safety of children to the greater goal of keeping Ireland safe from secularism. To understand what happened in Ferns, you have to remember the respect, devotion and fear inspired by the clerical collar in a society that bred its priests to be little gods and indulged them accordingly.

ONE OF THE things that emerges between the lines of the Ferns Report is the breathtaking arrogance of the abusers, their evident belief that they could get away with anything. The experience of impunity and the strut of power gave them a sense that they could do whatever they liked, wherever they liked. Fr James Doyle attacked a 12-year-old boy in the bathroom of the boy's own home, with the boy's father downstairs. The father heard the boy scream and ran upstairs. The door was open and the priest had the boy pinned into the corner, with his hands on his private parts.

Fr Sean Fortune attacked a boy in the front seat of his car while two elderly parishioners were sitting in the back. Having raped another boy weeks earlier, Fortune walked into the shop where the boy was working and announced aloud that he had had an Aids test and the boy had nothing to worry about. Canon Martin Clancy arrived at a house, asked the mother if he could speak to her daughter alone in her bedroom, molested the child and then returned again and again to do the same thing.

Father "Gamma" groped one young woman's private parts in the vestry of his church while her husband-to-be was waiting outside the door. He performed the wedding ceremony of another young woman whom he had repeatedly abused between the ages of 10 and 13.

This brazenness suggests a feeling of being untouchable that came from more than the knowledge that your superiors would protect you. It came, too, from the deference of lay people. You get a sense of it from one of the least obnoxious incidents detailed in the report. In the mid-1960s, "Des", who was a young adult, went to Fr "Delta" for a letter permitting his forthcoming marriage. The priest asked Des to unfasten his trousers so that Fr Delta could check that "everything down there was in working order". Des did what he was told and stood there for 10 minutes while the priest fondled his private parts. If an adult could respond so obediently, how could a child resist? It is too easy to assume that this culture of deference had subsided by the 1990s. In fact, much of it had taken a new, more militant form. During and after the culture wars of the 1980s, reporting child abuse by priests could be seen as an anti-clerical slur and even undeniably true allegations could be suppressed in the interests of the cause. This is why the crimes of James Grennan in Monageer or Sean Fortune in Poulfur, Co Wexford, could be met, not with universal outrage, but with a deeply divided community response.

ONE OF THE more bizarre attitudes to emerge in the Ferns Report is the twisted logic through which church authorities convinced themselves that serial abusers could be sent into strong communities because those parishes would have the collective resources to deal with the threat of a child rapist in their midst. Bishop Donal Herlihy explained his decision to inflict Sean Fortune on Poulfur by claiming that it was a closely-knit community and that "if Sean Fortune tried to do anything it would be stopped immediately by the community". In fact, the paedophile priests destroyed the very community values that were supposed to keep them in check. Many families were outraged by what was going on, but some sided with the priests. In Poulfur, while some parents were writing in protest to the bishop and the Papal Nuncio, others were dismissing allegations as lies. One of Fortune's victims told the inquiry that while everyone in Poulfur knew about the allegations against the priest, "half of the village was pro-Fortune and the other half anti-Fortune". In Monageer, only two families walked out of the Confirmationceremony when Bishop Comiskey stood shoulder to shoulder with the paedophile James Grennan.

Some of this unwillingness to stand up came from a genuine inability to believe that a priest could be a sexual predator. One boy, "Brendan", came home from a weekend away with Sean Fortune where he had been so savagely raped that he could barely walk and had blood all over his clothes. He refused to disclose what had happened and his parents told the inquiry that "they had heard that some of the boys in Poulfur were alleging that Fr Fortune was abusing them. However they said they thought it was a terrible thing for the boys to be saying about a priest and they did not understand it." Brendan committed suicide.

Such parents paid a horrific price for allowing their naivety to be exploited, and they were victims too. But other lay people in the community were driven by a different kind of ignorance - a violent, militant, wilful ignorance, a determination not to know and to stop anyone else from knowing either. In November 1990, for example, Fr James Doyle pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault arising from his attack on the 12-year-old boy in the boy's own home. The guilty plea meant that there was no room for disbelief. This was not an allegation, but a fact.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is a part of the story that the inquiry report does not tell. The Wexford People published a report of the court case in which Doyle pleaded guilty. Within an hour, the paper's switchboard was jammed with calls of protest, many of them highly abusive. The paper was flooded with hundreds of letters, almost all of them critical. Copies of the paper were burned during a protest outside the People offices on Wexford's Main Street. Lay Catholic organisations mounted a successful campaign to pressurise local businesses into withdrawing ads from the paper. Around the country, meanwhile, the same organisations mounted campaigns against the Stay Safe programme which was introduced into primary schools to give children the tools with which to report abuse.

The church's response to child abuse was collusive and the State's utterly negligent, and both need to undergo a stringent process of institutional and legislative reform. But such reforms will not work unless we also address the more uncomfortable question of the wider culture that facilitates the exploitation of children. In a context where the Constitution makes no mention of children's rights, where services for vulnerable kids are still massively under-resourced and where one Irish child in seven lives in consistent poverty, can we really claim that the era in which children were not our first priority is over?