Ahern adds fuel to row over Church and State

A ROW over the relationship between Church and State was fuelled yesterday by Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s defence of the Catholic Church’s role in education.

Mr Ahern, responding to the Ferns Report, referred to the sense of “disappointment” at the extent of child abuse exposed by the inquiry, but put it into the context of a Church that made an indispensable contribution to Irish education.

His robust comments may have been prompted by what he perceived as a slight made against him by Progressive Democrat TD Liz O’Donnell on Wednesday.

But in what may become a charged debate over the role of the Church in Irish society, Mr Ahern’s defence of the Church was last night criticised by One in Four’s Colm O’Gorman.

Mr O’Gorman expressed dismay at Mr Ahern’s “hasty response”.

“I can only assume he has either not yet read the Ferns Report or has yet to grasp its significance,” he said.

Responding to the Ferns Report in the Dáil on Wednesday, Ms O’Donnell said the “cosy phone calls” between the All Hallows seminary in Drumcondra and Government Buildings must end.

The Drumcondra seminary is near to where Mr Ahern grew up and still lives.

Evidently taking umbrage at Ms O’Donnell’s apparent reference to him, Mr Ahern said: “Yes, I do ring All Hallows. I will ring All Hallows. My father has worked in All Hallows, or did for half a century. My house is called All Hallows. The land (on which it is built) is in All Hallows.

“So I will make apologies to nobody, including Liz O’Donnell, for being in touch with All Hallows.”

He also dismissed her call for Church influence to be removed from 3,000 of the State’s schools.

“Without the Church helping civil society, Ireland would not have come as far as it has,” he said.

“If the Church pulled out we could not manage.”

Ms O’Donnell’s condemnation of the Church’s “unhealthy” special relationship with Government was not shared by some of her party colleagues.

Justice Minister Michael McDowell said she was speaking in a personal capacity, not expressing party policy. He said, however, the PDs believed in separation of Church and State, governed by an arms-length relationship based on mutual respect.

Mr O’Gorman honed in on what he said was Mr Ahern’s inadequate response, particularly that he had confined it to a sense of disappointment.

“One in Four believe the comments made by Mr Ahern to be ill-timed and poorly judged,” he said.

Labour Party deputy leader Liz McManus also criticised his remarks as “devoid of any real understanding of the level of depravity and the extent of the Church’s cover-up as revealed in the Ferns Report”.