A further delay with the State’s scheme to provide redress to survivors of abuse in primary schools illustrates the Government’s inadequate response to its legal obligations, the special rapporteur on child protection has warned.

One In Four has said it may never know what happened to people it had to "turn away" last year when it closed its waiting list because it could not cope with demand from victims of sexual abuse.

Legal experts and civil rights groups have said it is imperative that the Government open a public consultation on how redress schemes should operate.

A religious order that accepted that children were abused in its care told the Minister for Education in 2015 that plans to retain child abuse records would lead to “eternal besmirching of the names of good people”.

Fr Michael Cleary didn’t have to cope with loneliness or celibacy, having fathered a family, writes Terry Prone

A woman who took a case against the State to the European Court of Human Rights has expressed disappointment at the State’s failure to compensate victims of sexual abuse in day schools.

Organisers of a large scale event in Dublin tomorrow to mark 20 years since the State apology to victims of clerical child sex abuse and a decade on from the publication of the Ryan Report have said they "regret" a lack of consultation with many survivors over the schedule and related issues.

Pope Francis has declined to accept the resignation of French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin as archbishop of Lyon after he was convicted of failing to report a known predator priest to police, the Vatican said.

Who would ever, in any sense, regard the lighting of a candle as an act of atonement or reparation? asks Fergus Finlay.

Church leaders from around the world are gathering after Pope Francis summoned them for a summit on how to deal with cases of sex abuse by clergy.

A religious order that is supposed to hand over a lucrative Dublin property as part of the decade-old clerical abuse compensation deal has been ignoring since last summer State legal letters over repeated delays.

Priests who die while facing accusations of sexual abuse are being denied a traditional Catholic funeral.

Fr Naughton had been an abuser of children for 25 years, transferred from parish to parish.

Outcry as Daniel Duane addresses 11 allegations made against him.

The Catholic Church has handed over little more than half of the compensation money it promised to give victims of repeated physical and sexual abuse, leaving survivors hundreds of millions of euro out of pocket.

A report on sexual abuse inside the Catholic Church in Germany says 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014, two leading German media outlets have said.

The Vatican’s retired ambassador to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano, has accused Pope Francis and other officials of covering up that they were aware of sex abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington.

A Mass congregation broke out in applause yesterday as victims and survivors of clerical and industrial abuse were formally commemorated in Cork.

A priest who has served for more than 40 years in the Diocese of Cloyne plans to commemorate victims of mother and baby homes and of clerical sex abuse at a Mass in Youghal tomorrow.

If protecting children begins, as it should, with identifying risk, then Catholic priests are among the cohorts of least risk to children in today’s Ireland, writes Margaret Hickey

Pressure is mounting on the Pope to use his Irish visit to apologise to victims of abuse by members of the Catholic Church.

The most senior Roman Catholic cleric convicted of covering up child sex abuse has been ordered by an Australian court to serve his one-year sentence in home detention rather than jail.

An audit looking at almost 2,000 allegations of clerical child sex abuse has found that 67 former Christian Brothers accused of abuse were “not traceable”, while others were visiting families with children where parents might have been unaware of any allegations.

Caranua paid almost €100,000 to a Catholic Church-funded counselling service to provide support to abuse survivors over the last two years.

A bank inquiry-style Oireachtas investigation is needed to “get to the bottom” of why 18 religious orders have failed to pay hundreds of millions of euro to abuse victims who were meant to benefit from a multi-billion State redress scheme.

The Department of Education will be grilled by TDs next month on whether it really expects religious orders to pay everything owed under a 2002 deal on the costs of redress for institutional abuse.

The Government are deliberately trying to limit compensation to those who were abused as children in primary schools, the Dáil has heard.

The Department of Education has been criticised by child abuse survivors for failing to consult them on the possible replacement of a permanent memorial with an exhibition.

The Government is looking at seizing hospital and school lands owned by the church as a means of meeting the €1.6bn cost of sexual abuse redress payments.

The Government says it will continue to assert “moral pressure” on religious orders to provide more money to cover the costs of redress to survivors of residential abuse, with one survivors’ group claiming Pope Francis should become involved.

Dr Michael Woods may not be a household name anymore, but his ongoing influence on the clerical abuse redress scheme controversy cannot be understated.

Lands owned by the Catholic Church should be given to the Irish people as a “token of its remorse” to those sexually abused in schools, former Labour leader Ruairi Quinn has said.

Clerical abuse survivor and campaigner, Marie Collins, said she resigned from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors because a group of people in the Vatican had been obstructing its work, including not following recommendations from the Pope.

Five priests in the Dublin Archdiocese have been the subject of child abuse allegations since last year.

Pope Francis has created a new Vatican tribunal section to hear cases of bishops who fail to protect children from sexually abusive priests.

Dozens of new allegations or suspicions of historic abuse by Catholic clergy have been raised with a national watchdog in the past year.

An organisation founded to help the partners and children of Catholic priests has had almost 3,000 hits on its website since it was launched last month.

Better late than never must be the response to the news that a website has been established to help the partners and children of Catholic priests. 

Pope Francis has announced he will meet a group of sex abuse victims next month at the Vatican and declared "zero tolerance" for any member of the clergy who would violate a child.

The Catholic Church needs to do more to help survivors of child abuse, according to the watchdog for child protection.

A Catholic priest has said he would do anything to protect a child, but that he would not break the seal of confession.

Pope Francis has said he takes personal responsibility for the “evil” of priests who raped and molested children, asking forgiveness from victims and saying the Church must be even bolder in its efforts to protect the young.

The fact that a dozen paedophile priests were active in Dublin in the 1970s has been described by the city’s Catholic Archbishop Diarmuid Martin as a tragedy.

The Vatican “systematically” adopted policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children over decades, a UN human rights committee said today.

Pope Benedict XVI defrocked nearly 400 priests in two years for molesting children, a document obtained by the Associated Press shows.

The Vatican has told Polish prosecutors that its former ambassador to the Dominican Republic, under investigation for alleged sex abuse, is covered by diplomatic immunity.

A Roman Catholic priest who won an appeal against his landmark conviction in the church sex abuse scandal has left a Pennsylvania prison after 18 months behind bars.

Concerns about a priest who was serial paedophile were not passed on to senior diocesan figures or to the authorities in the north west despite being known at a early stage.

Just 12 Christian Brothers have been convicted of child sex abuse despite allegations being made against 325 members of the order, a safeguarding audit has found.

The Catholic Church’s child safety watchdog has said it may never know the number of victims of clerical sex abuse where priests could have been taken out of circulation earlier to prevent further harm.