IRELAND
Spectator (United Kingdom)
Alex Massie
Thursday, 10th May 2012
Last night, I finally watched last week’s BBC This World documentary investigating the latest stage of the child abuse scandal that is destroying the Catholic Church in Ireland and, like Jenny McCartney, suspect it is time for Cardinal Sean Brady, Primate of All-Ireland, to resign his post. I don’t suppose Cardinal Brady is a bad man, nor should one suppose that his resignation would draw some manner f line under the whole, sorry, rotten, scandalous affair. But it would be more than just a gesture too. William Oddie, writing in the Catholic Herald, plainly would prefer Brady to remain in office but accepts he “almost certainly” must “bow before the storm”.
The BBC programme probably did, as Cardinal Brady complains, overstate the role he played in the Brendan Smyth affair back in the mid-1970s. Brady maintains he was a mere notary – that is, note-taker – when he heard evidence from 14 year old Brendan Boland that Smyth was abusing young boys. Boland even supplied the names and addresses of some of Smyth’s other victims. Despite this, none of the parents of any of the five children named by Boland were told of what was happening and Boland himself was asked to sign an oath agreeing that he would keep his testimony secret and speak about it only to “authorised priests”.
Brady submitted his reports and that was that. Smyth was, for a spell, subject to a “children’s ban” though this did not prevent him from abusing other children. In any case, the ban, ineffective though it had proved, was formally lifted in 1984. The man who made that decision was Bishop McKiernan of Kilmore who was also Father Brady’s Bishop at the time. No-one argues that Father Brady had, then or now, primary or even secondary responsibility for thwarting Smyth. Nevertheless he was, at the very least, an accessory to the failure to stop Smyth raping young boys.
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