IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests
Sean O’Connaill deplores the bishops’ lack of transparency on the funding and independence of the national body for child protection that they set up (the NSBCCC), and hopes for the day when bishops will be accountable to their people.
Beginning 20 years ago in 1994, the Irish Catholic church was struck by the greatest ever blow to its morale and survival – the revelation that not only could Irish Catholic children suffer life-threatening abuse from a small minority of their clergy, but (far worse) that other ordained men who carry the church’s symbol of pastoral care, the shepherd’s crook, could fail to exert their canonical power to protect those children – and could use that power instead to conceal the crime of the erring priest. In the years that followed, and especially in 2002, it became clear that this failure, and the secrecy that masked it, would follow a pattern affecting even Ireland’s most populous diocese, Dublin.
So serious was the ensuing loss of trust in their commitment to the safety of Catholic children that Irish bishops set up in 2007 the National Board for the Safeguarding of Children in the Catholic Church – to monitor their own safeguarding performance. In recognition of the depth of scepticism that the clerical church could ever be trusted to monitor itself, the NBSCCC’s first CEO was Ian Elliott, a highly experienced child care professional – and a Presbyterian layman.
Elliott soon proved his determination and integrity by not only finding serious failings in the child safeguarding provision of the diocese of Cloyne, but by withstanding the threat of legal action against him by the diocese’s child protection team. He went on to train the child safeguarding personnel, and to develop the clear safeguarding guidelines, that allow the Irish Bishops’ Conference to claim today that their church in every diocese in Ireland is a model for child safety that the wider world could learn from.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.