IRELAND
Irish Examiner
By Niall Murray
That child sex abuse took place to such an extent within the Church as it did historically was inexcusable, he said. But while immense progress is being made in Ireland to deal with the issues, Archbishop Martin said there was a very strange situation in which people did not seem to realise the dangers of allowing abusers move around.
“The statistics will tell us that the number of paedophiles in society always remains the same,” Archbishop Martin told RTÉ radio’s This Week programme.
“The more you make certain areas no-go zones for paedophiles, then they appear somewhere else and they could appear somewhere else in the Church as well.
“For me, the big tragedy is: Why was it that, in the 1970s, there were 12 serial paedophiles active in the Dublin diocese at the same time. Something happened in those years, I don’t know, we haven’t got the analysis of it.”
Archbishop Martin said the recent European Court of Human Rights judgment in the case of Louise O’Keeffe, abused as a child in 1973 by her primary school principal, stated that the prosecution of child sex abusers waned a little after the 1960s.
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