Embassy closure fallout

The decision to close the Irish embassy to the Vatican may have been a Cabinet decision, but Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore was seen as the plan’s chief architect, reports Political Editor Paul O’Brien

WHEN Enda Kenny delivered his stinging denunciation of the Vatican on July 20, the public response was overwhelmingly supportive.

Mr Kenny, speaking in the Dáil, claimed the Cloyne Report into clerical child sexual abuse had exposed “the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism [and] the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day”.