IRELAND
WA Today (Australia)
November 18, 2012
What angers people most is the cover-up, writes Karen Kissane from Dublin.
MARIE Collins was 13 and in Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children when she was abused. It was the hospital chaplain, a Catholic priest. He went to jail for it, many years later, like so many of his colleagues in Ireland, but only after decades of misery for Ms Collins.
”I never connected his abuse with the church,” she says. ”I thought it was somehow my fault and that I was a bad person who had brought it on myself. I had years of depression and agoraphobia that included nine admissions to psychiatric wards.”
As a young adult, anxious that other children not be hurt as she had, she told a priest in her parish. ”He told me it was probably my fault, that I must have led the poor man on, but that I was forgiven and I could go away and forget about it.”
Ms Collins did go away, into more years of silence and depression. The misery did not lift until after her attacker, Father Paul McGennis, was jailed in 1997 over offences involving her and another child he abused 18 years after Collins. He was later convicted of having raped a third girl, 24 years after he attacked Ms Collins.
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