Here’s former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern talking in the Irish Examiner about the criticisms levelled at the bishops in the light of the Murphy Report:
I mean it’s difficult for them all. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean they are all saying different things as far as I can see. Some of them are saying they are going to wait and see the priests in the diocese. Others are saying they will wait to see what the public will say. Over the next week or so, we will see where it goes. Most of the focus seems to be on the man in Limerick. A lot of the others are old and effectively retired anyway.
Oh, poor chaps. It is difficult for them, isn’t it? Having their reprehensible behaviour made public must be tough to cope with. You know, it’s them we should feel sorry for. This all happened years ago and now people want them to be held accountable? What are we thinking? People go on and on about the victims but why is nobody thinking about how hard this must be for the bishops?
And the old and retired ones – sure leave them in peace. They’re just auld fellas now. Who cares if they helped priests rape young children in the past? Thankfully Bertie is around to set us straight. The horrible little prick. A man employed by the Sisters of Mercy before he entered political life. A man who agreed to a deal which saw the taxpayer most liable for the compensation that the religious orders should have paid. A man who is trying to tell us what’s going on at the moment is ‘difficult’ for the bishops?
Give me fucking strength. Yet this is the kind of attitude at the top of Irish political life which has allowed these kinds of crimes to be committed – and it’s not as if he doesn’t have plenty of previous. Aside from Enda Kenny which of our political leaders has said that the bishops should resign? Disappointly, to me at least, Eamonn Gilmore said it was a matter for the religious orders, as did the Taoiseach, but why has nobody apart from the leader of Fine Gael condemned these men outright and said that they should not continue in the roles they currently hold? Why am I not surprised that the Minister for Education is more concered about how he is perceived amongst the catholic zealots than doing what is right?
Technically you might say that politicians have no business interfering with the running of a religious order – but did the religious orders do us the same courtesy? No they did not. For years they ruled Irish life, and Irish people, without any mandate whatsoever to do so. What we did or how we did it was none of their business yet they poked their nose in every which way they could. Why should we now sit back and let them behind technicalities?
Willie Walsh was on the radio today crying about how he was in no position to judge anyone for their behaviour. I’m sorry, but if a man of god can’t judge someone who rapes a child then what is the fucking point? It’s not for god to judge the actions of that person, it is for us and for the courts to judge. As it is with the bishops who were part of the cover up.
Politicians, and especially the leaders of the parties, need to stand up to these people and say they should not continue in their current positions, that they should be prosecuted for withholding evidence of crimes, for enabling crimes to happen. They knowingly sent men to places where they knew they would abuse children. Why the fuck are we pussyfooting around them?
Most likely nothing will happen, but for fucks sake say it. Those who don’t are, like so many, afraid of the backlash from the faithful. Maybe if they grew a set of balls they might just earn the respect of the rest of us.
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Update:Brian Coward defends the vatican, from where on high the cover-up began and who refused to cooperate with the commission. This is the leader of this joke of a country, remember.
See any priest that abused a child? Prosecute him. I don’t care if he’s 90 years of age and dribbling down his chin. Prosecute him.
See any bishop that covered it up, that moved a priest, that helped that priest abuse again? Prosecute him.
Any archbishop or cardinal, any lay person or any health worker, any member of any government or any minister for health that knew about this and did nothing? Prosecute. Start at the top and work your way down. Nobody should be exempt.
We hear all this talk about resignations. Fuck resignations. If a bishop is still a bishop when he’s sent down for covering up heinous crimes then all the better. That’s a nice message to send.
And when we’ve finished prosecuting them ALL, we can go about making things right. Get the church out of our schools and hospitals. Look at the power they still have, further generations blinded to their malign influence, people making excuses for the rape of children. Think about that. They went to church yesterday, providing physical, moral and financial support to an organisation that rapes children. How sad.
The church’s hold over the main government party shouldn’t be underestimated either. The Minister for Justice introduced a blasphemous libel law, for fucks sake. There are well known connections between senior members of FF, past and present, and right wing catholic groups like Opus Dei and the Knights of Columbanus.
Look at the wicked deal Minister for Education Michael Woods did with the religious orders. He protected them and their assets and left the bulk of the compensation for abuse claims to be paid by taxpayers. Explain to me how the taxpayer is in any way liable for crimes carried out by the church?
Ireland is a nation where nobody in power is accountable for anything they do. Not politicians, bankers, senators, the church. That has to change.
Criminals, regardless of their assumed position in society, must be responsible for their crimes. I’m a bit surprised we haven’t had more in the media calling for prosecutions in the wake of the Murphy Report, but maybe the influence of the church goes deeper than we think.
As the faithful go to mass today – and I’m sure poor attendance will be because of the rain, nothing else – what leadership has the Taoiseach shown in the wake of the Dublin report?
People want to see criminals prosecuted, whether they’re priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, lay people, Gardai who failed to act or anybody else who was involved in this huge conspiracy against the people of Ireland.
Brian Cowen says “I believe that just as there must be no ambiguity about the fact that all institutions and individuals are answerable to the law of the land, whatever their status, it is for those institutions and their members to determine the appropriateness of any individual to hold ecclesiastical office”.
Coward. He is afraid to criticise the church. He is afraid to say that those who perpetrated crimes against young people, those who covered them up, those who enabled vicious paedophiles to rape their way from parish to parish, are not fit to hold office in a church.
If a Fine Gael TD was discovered to be a child rapist, you can be sure he would say it. If the head of the Boy Scouts of Ireland was a paedophile he would say it. Would he not openly question the suitability of members of the Teachers Union to hold office in their organisation if it were discovered that they had spent decades abusing children then covering it up? Of course he would.
Yet when this country needs leadership, when we desperately want somebody in power to speak out against an organisation that has been guilty of the most unconscionable crimes, Brian Coward won’t do it, because he is afraid. Afraid of the church, afraid of the backlash from disciples of the church, the brainwashed masses for whom this is an irrelevance because the church can do no wrong.
He is pathetic. A spineless yellow-belly who has no right to supposedly lead this country. He is saying that we have no authority over these men … and let us remember that is all they are. They may have a collar and parish but they are just men, subject to the same laws as any of us, and if we had been involved in the kind of crimes and cover-ups the church has been we would be prosecuted and jailed. They are not special, they have no higher place in society, they are just men, yet Coward allows them to maintain the falshehood that they live on some kind of pedestal.
He is allowing them to continue the kind of behaviour that has led to this appalling mess. He is condoning their behaviour. The Taoiseach. The leader of the country. He is a disgrace.
Ireland is broken and will stay broken as long as those in charge have no will to make things right. And those of you who go to church today and put money in the plate, you are complicit. Shame on you.
The audio clip below is a Father Tom Doyle, an expert in canon law, speaking to RTE’s Prime Time … in 2002 (hat tip @mark_coughlan).
His final words – “There’s something radically, radically wrong”.
Yesterday we discovered how wrong. The Dublin Diocesan report was published. It catalogues the systematic and constant abuse of children by priests. It details the knowledge that the Catholic Church had of it, how they moved paedophile priests from one parish to another, how they covered up, ignored the problem, used their power to sweep the rape of children under the carpet, how they, more than anything, acted to protect the church at the expense of innocent young people.
We were told the Gardai knew about it but these evil men were not punished simply because of who they were. The white collar and the frock protected them from prosecution. We were told of non-cooperation from the Vatican who refused to answer the commission’s questions. We learned that the Dublin Archdiocese took out insurance in the 80s to protect itself from compensation claims they knew would eventually come.
Acts of self-preservation to protect the ‘good name’ of the church, the assets of the church, the power and influence of the church and its priests. And in order to do that they allowed children to be beaten and raped and buggered. They protected men who destroyed not just those children’s lives but those of their families as the betrayal of an implicit trust became known.
Is there another organisation in the world that would go to such lengths to cover up such abuse instead of tackling it? I can’t think of one. The normal reaction of a person when they discover something like this is to ensure that the person in question is punished. Anyone with an ounce of goodness or morality would not allow somebody like that to go scot-free. They would, at the very least, try and stop them from doing it again.
But the bishops and the cardinals did no such thing. They allowed these men to go from town to town, leaving a trail of shattered lives behind them. They not only did nothing to stop them, they faciliated them, they aided them, allowing them to carry out monstrous acts of abuse over and over and over again.
Let’s be clear – the catholic church in Ireland has abused its power for too long and something has to give now. Not only with regard to the victims of abuse – like the children our lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin who were abused by the Chaplain – but every part of Irish society has suffered. The stranglehold they have had on Irish society and culture, on the Irish people, has been like that of a dictator. You cannot do this, you cannot think that, this is a sin, that is a sin, and we have accepted it because it has always been like that.
The Irish people’s reaction to the church is almost like Stockholm Syndrome, where the kidnappee feels trust or affection for the person who has taken them. The church has relentlessly abused the people of Ireland on every level and still people go to mass, they put money in the plate to fund the lifestyles of men who work for an organisation that facilitates the rape and physical abuse of children. In what decent society should this be tolerated?
If any other group had a track record like the catholic church would we allow it to exist? If it were a youth group whose workers sexually abused kids and whose leaders knew and didn’t say anything what would we do? We would prosectute those people. The Gardai would not turn a blind eye. And parents would never send their children to that youth group. Yet in spite of everything we know about the catholic church parents still blindly send their children to be indoctrinated into a church which has been the proponent of a huge conspiracy against the people of Ireland.
The kids go to school, they get their first communion, they do a religion class which is not about learning about religion, it’s about learning how to become a catholic, how to subject yourself to the church. Parents every single day in this country send their children to be educated by these people. This has to stop. Education should be about education, it should not be about religion. If you want to send your children to a catholic school then that is your choice. But there must be an immediate separation of the school system, funded by taxpayers, and the catholic church.
By all means teach about religion, it’s educational. Let kids know there is more to religion that catholicism. But no longer can we allow children to brainwashed via the school system by an organisation that cares nothing for them, only about its own power, influence and wealth. We cannot allow it continue. If we, as a nation, want to move forward, to better ourselves, then there must be an absolute separation between the church and the state. People talk about Ireland being a secular nation, it is not. Still the church thinks it can lecture to us about what we can and cannot do.
Laughably they think they still have some moral authority. It’s a bitter laugh though. They tell us we should we be anti-abortion, against homosexuality, that we shouldn’t allow drinks companies to sponsor sporting events, that we shouldn’t use contraception, and so much more. Their moralistic proclamations at odds with their criminal actions. They preach at us as if we were the ones that needed it. The truth is the Irish people need to stand up to the church, to tell them that they have gone too far, that we will not stand for what they have done.
And what they have done has come with the full knowledge and blessing, if you will, of the Vatican. The centre of the catholic church, from where the Pope, the head of the church, guides his flock. And they knew all about the priests and others in this country who raped children. They knew that the idea of solving the problem was moving the priest to another parish where he could find fresh meat, and I won’t apologise for that comparison because they were predators. From the very top of this most corrupt organisation nothing was done to protect the most vulnerable people in our society.
And it is a shame on this country, a stain on us all. They have ridden roughshod over the people of Ireland and the people of Ireland have allowed it to happen. We have tolerated the kind of behaviour that nobody in their right mind would tolerate from somebody else. We have to stop it now. We have to stand up and let them know that we will not accept it anymore.
Their apologies have come too late. They’re mealy-mouthed and the simple fact is that they are only apologising because they have been caught and because they have no choice. If they were really sorry about the actions of the evil men who carried out abuse in their name then they would have stopped it when they found out. They would have handed these people over to the authorities, cooperated fully and accepted the punishments handed down. They did nothing of the sort, they made it worse. And worse. And worse. And now the whole thing has been blown wide open the victims are supposed to accept an apology? I don’t think so. The rest of us are supposed to forgive and forget because of some PR company prepared press release from a despicable man like Desmond Connell?
Remember – this is only Dublin. There are 26 dioceses in Ireland and does anyone think Dublin was alone? Of course not. The scale of it, given the size of the area, is likely to be bigger here but I am positive the same kind of abuse went on in every single diocese in Ireland. There must be an investigation in each one because there are criminals who need to be punished and victims who need to see that happen.
When the previous report into Instutional abuse was published back in May there was, rightly, outrage. But then life went on, people forgot, the church continued its business as usual and you even had reports of attendances at mass being up. I’m doubtful they’re true but that we have allowed that spin to remain unchallenged is a shame on us. Now, after the Dublin report confirmed what we all knew (and how sad is it that so little of it was that shocking?), we cannot allow that to happen again.
The catholic church is a massively corrupt business. Nothing more. Imagine a large business who, it turns out, polluted rivers and caused deaths via cancer. It would be shut down. Or people would refuse to use its products. The catholic church is that business, it has caused deaths, it has destroyed countless lives, all for money, all for reputation, and if we continue to tolerate its presence then we are the fools who get nothing more than we deserve.
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A final word for people like Andrew Madden and Marie Collins. The word ‘hero’ is bandied around too often, so often that it loses its meaning, but in this case is it is the only word that is appropriate. They are heroes for what they have done. Their bravery and courage in facing up to what happened to them and their determination to ensure those who carried out the abuse are punished cannot be commended enough.
Without them there might be generations of victims still being preyed upon by the wicked men of god.
