IRELAND
Irish Independent
Thursday September 06 2012
IT’S almost 20 years since the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy established an ‘advisory panel’ to deal with the scourge of clerical sexual abuse.
They were on a ‘learning-curve’ then, the argument goes, and they didn’t know that the abuse of a child was a crime.
It must have been one hell of a learning curve if Bishop John Kirby’s comments on paedophilia are to be taken at face value.
Yesterday, as a report was published that showed how he had moved two priests accused of abuse to another parish in the early 1990s, the Bishop of Clonfert said he thought at the time that the abuse of a child was a “friendship that crossed a boundary line”.
Dealing with abuse, Bishop Kirby told Galway Bay FM, had been a “very difficult experience” for him.
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