IRELAND
Irish Times
Patsy McGarry
The Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has strongly defended the 2009 Murphy report on the handling of clerical child sexual abuse in the archdiocese, while praising the work of the late bishop Dermot O’Mahony, who was criticised in that report.
“I stand over the conclusions of the Murphy report,” he said, pointing to the fact that nobody had challenged it in the courts.
The report found that Bishop O’Mahony’s handling of complaints and suspicions of child sexual abuse was “particularly bad”, adding that he had been aware of such complaints involving 13 priests.
At the bishop’s funeral in Dublin last Tuesday, auxiliary bishop of Dublin Eamonn Walsh said the deceased had been “scapegoated in a society that at the time ignored the principle of equity, audi alteram partem, to hear the other side”.
Bishop Walsh said his late colleague “stood silently before his hearers knowing that to speak would cause greater pain to those who suffered”.
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