Victims’ fight for justice ‘vindicated’

VICTIMS of abuse carried out by priests, amid collusion by the Catholic Church and gardaí, yesterday said the publication of the Murphy Report on the Archdiocese of Dublin had “vindicated” their fight for justice.

But the survivors of the shocking abuse catalogued in the report also said similar inquiries need to take place in every diocese in the country.

Marie Collins, who was abused while a patient at Our Ladies Hospital in Crumlin in the early 1960s, said the publication of the report was “the end of a very long road”.

She said victims who went public with the abuse they had endured were “vilified by the Church, and called liars”, at a time when the Church only sought to protect itself.

“The institutions came before the welfare of the children in this country,” she said. “All their [the Church’s] denials are proved to be false.”

Ms Collins, One in Four director Maeve Lewis and survivor Andrew Madden all admitted to being shocked at the scale of the abuse catalogued in the Murphy Commission report.

All three were also furious at what they said was the inappropriate air of deference shown to the Church by other arms of the state at a time when priests carrying out child sexual abuse were simply being moved from parish to parish.

Their reaction was mirrored by children’s rights groups such as the ISPCC, Barnardos and the Children’s Rights Alliance, who all united in calls for the rights of the child to be enshrined in the Constitution and for greater resources to be put towards child protection.

Andrew Madden said the report was a “shocking indictment” of the Catholic Church and would also be a “missed opportunity” if swift action is not taken to ensure that such abuse can never be repeated.

“Never again should the Catholic Church in Ireland attempt to blame others for its own decisions to reassign priests who were clearly a danger to children,” he said.

“Many times in the past the Archdiocese has claimed that such priests were only reappointed following medical advice to the effect that it was safe to do so.

“The truth, as spelled out in this report, shows that in many cases the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin misled the medical professionals it referred offending priests to and even when it received recommendations to send priests for residential rehabilitation or remove them from having access to children, this medical advice was ignored,” Mr Madden said.

Ms Collins said the Church’s continued adherence to Canon Law and the scrapping of its own Our Children, Our Church guidelines proved the Church was incapable of monitoring itself.

This view was echoed by Maeve Lewis, who said following the report’s publication “we need to hang our heads in shame”.

She said there had been an inappropriate relationship between priests and gardaí and Church and state.

Ms Collins and Mr Madden criticised the decision to only grant them a copy of the report at 11am yesterday, as both had written to Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern earlier this year asking for an embargoed copy to be provided to survivors 24 hours in advance of publication. Instead leaks from the report appeared in last weekend’s Sunday newspapers, described by Ms Collins as “a disgrace”.