IRELAND
The Irish Catholic
by Greg Daly
July 14, 2016
Last month saw the publication of the final tranche of reports from the first phase of reviews by the Irish Church’s safeguarding board, and the overall picture, according to board head Teresa Devlin, is one of steady progress.
“You really need to look at the detail of the reports to see that some orders took a while to get the culture of safeguarding embedded,” she explains, continuing, “the Church has had guidance in place since 1996 and the first set of National Board standards were in 2008, and it probably wasn’t until 2012 that some of them started to put proper standards around their practices and report sharply to the Guards and the HSE. Others of course hit the ground running much longer before that.”
Observing that “for most of them it was steady progress”, she stresses that “For all of them, obviously, they’re now reporting sharply to the Guards and to Tusla – they are now following the standards and policies.”
The modern Irish Church is a safe place for children, she maintains. “It’s not for me to talk about other bodies, but I think the Church since I think about 2008 recognised that they need to do something very quickly. They put in place the national board and the standards, and it is definitely much, much better,” she says.
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