IRELAND
Irish Times
Patsy McGarry
Fri, Feb 7, 2014
The Irish Catholic Church’s child-protection watchdog has welcomed this week’s UN Committee on the Rights of the Child report on the Vatican’s handling of clerical child sexual abuse.
In particular, the Maynooth-based National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland (NBSCCCI) welcomed the recommendations on eliminating corporal punishment where children are concerned, and it calls for an internal church inquiry into the religious who ran the Magdalene laundries and to pay compensation to the women in them.
Observations
Last night the board said that “as an organisation we are pleased that a significant number of observations and recommendations [in the UN report] relating to child abuse in the Catholic Church are already in place due to the work of the NBSCCCI and the church.
“To cite a few examples; clear procedures are now in place for reporting to the civil authorities and children’s rights awareness training has been taking place.
“We believe that we have come a long way in recognising the rights of children to protection, but we are acutely conscious that there is no room for complacency.”
It welcomed the UN recommendation that the Vatican “establish a mechanism at a high level with the mandate and capacity to co-ordinate the implementation of children’s rights across all pontifical councils, episcopal conferences” as well as all “that functions under the authority of the Holy See”.
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