IRELAND
WA Today (Australia)

November 18, 2012

What angers people most is the cover-up, writes Karen Kissane from Dublin.

MARIE Collins was 13 and in Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children when she was abused. It was the hospital chaplain, a Catholic priest. He went to jail for it, many years later, like so many of his colleagues in Ireland, but only after decades of misery for Ms Collins.

”I never connected his abuse with the church,” she says. ”I thought it was somehow my fault and that I was a bad person who had brought it on myself. I had years of depression and agoraphobia that included nine admissions to psychiatric wards.”

As a young adult, anxious that other children not be hurt as she had, she told a priest in her parish. ”He told me it was probably my fault, that I must have led the poor…