Connell’s good deeds put aside as his reputation is trashed by media

IT’S a pity many of us in Ireland only discuss religion when we are very drunk or very angry. Right now, anger has the floor.

After the Prime Time documentary on child sexual abuse the many good deeds of Cardinal Desmond Connell have been put aside while people queue up to trash his good name.

I have little doubt that the Cardinal will co-operate with any inquiries that now take place. Indeed he has nothing to lose; right now his actions and those of other church leaders are being viewed in the worst possible light.

It should not be forgotten that, since 1996, the church has been reporting all allegations of child sexual abuse to the Gardaí. Or indeed that Cardinal Connell has promised to give Judge Gillian Hussey access to all files in his diocese for an independent audit. The train of accountability has, in fact, already left the station.

You might think that only a fool or a fraud would try to defend Cardinal Connell at this time. I hope I am neither. I worked for him for five years and I know, for example, that he and other bishops did not learn fast enough how to deal effectively with abusing priests. They lacked foresight and managerial skills. Certain decisions they took, or failed to take, contributed to the pain of those abused by priests and, perhaps, also to the risk of further abuse.

When the full story is told, the Cardinal will be shown to have made many mistakes, some of them serious. But history will judge him to have acted with integrity and sincerity in his efforts to combat child sexual abuse.

I find it very troubling that few commentators are ready to distinguish between serious mistakes, which may be resigning matters, and deliberate attempts to pervert the course of justice, which should be jailing matters.

I am troubled too because there is no attempt to compare the standard of the Church response to this problem with the standards followed by other institutions. For example, the Sunday Independent reported three days ago that in March 1997 the Eastern Health Board was ‘considering’ whether to report the case of a known paedophile to the Gardaí. Yet the Dublin diocese was reporting mere allegations of child sexual abuse since late 1995.

Most of all, I am troubled because anyone who seeks to bring balance to this picture right now will be accused of putting the reputation of the Church before the needs of those abused. I have no wish to do that. But we should all be worried by the complete abandonment of fairness and decency which the Prime Time documentary has sparked and which public anger has mandated in recent days. For example, the Fine Gael leader, Enda Kenny, said he didn’t accept the recent statement by Cardinal Connell that the welfare of children had been his first priority in handling abuse cases since it was “not consistent with what we have learned since”. But the Fine Gael leader, it turns out, has not even seen the Prime Time documentary yet.

Even if he had, it is hard to see how Prime Time could have informed him as to the actual motivations of Cardinal Connell, whatever about the mistakes made in the handling of abuse cases.

I had reservations about this Prime Time documentary from the start. The bishops had already appointed retired Judge Gillian Hussey and given her a free hand to pick a team and to conduct a thorough audit of how each case was handled. RTE chose to pre-empt this. At their best, television documentaries shine a light where darkness prevails. They lead to inquiries (as happened in the diocese of Ferns) which bring out the full truth of events. At their worst, they can disrupt the work of a thorough enquiry by prejudging the issues and preparing the public to reject its findings.

This is what is happening. On Thursday night, Prime Time did a fine job of presenting the case for the prosecution. But they showed zero interest in giving the case for the defence.

I believe this because, despite asking for an interview with Cardinal Connell at an early stage, the programme-makers avoided putting specific charges to the Dublin Archdiocese until two days before the documentary.

When the diocese came back with precise answers, these were not included in the programme and viewers were left to draw certain very serious inferences.

(1) The worst of these concerned the report that Cardinal Connell had signed a letter of reference in 1988 to allow Dublin priest Fr Pat Hughes to work in America. Prime Time questioned the diocese’s claim that Cardinal Connell did not know of a 1974 allegation against Hughes and contrasted this with its ability to give a full account of the case in 1995. The diocese claims the file was not in the archive in 1988 and it is, of course, to blame for this. But Prime Time should still have broadcast the diocese’s explanation that when it was sued in 1993 it recalled Hughes from America, and in that way found out that there had been an allegation in 1974.

(2) Prime Time did nothing to dispel the impression that when another abuser, Fr Tony Walsh, was dismissed from the priesthood in 1993, the Gardaí were still in the dark about his perverse activities. But Prime Time already knew that the Dublin diocese had informed the police about Walsh’s whereabouts back in March 1992.

(3) In another section of the documentary, Prime Time interviewed Mr John Brennan, a parishioner in Valleymount parish, who said he wrote to the diocese in May 1999 but they never replied. This would indeed be damning.

But, here again, Prime Time refused to transmit the diocese’s statement:

“Neither the Cardinal nor the Diocesan offices have any record of having received a letter from Mr Brennan. Any such letter is given high priority. Mr Brennan’s name is not known to us and we have no means of being in contact with him.”

Prime Time also claimed that “gardaí made repeated attempts, all without success” to interview retired Bishop Dermot O’Mahony in connection with the Fr Ivan Payne case in 1997. But Bishop O’Mahony told the Star newspaper in 1998 that he was unable to speak to the gardaí because he was convalescing in the United States after a serious illness. “The gardaí did make an attempt to contact me on numerous occasions but an equivalent number of unsuccessful attempts at contact was made by my office,” he stated.

It is interesting too that whereas Prime Time presenter, Miriam O’Callaghan, was allowed to view the documentary the day before it was screened, diocesan representatives were denied access until one hour before transmission. As any lawyer can testify, one essential feature of fair procedures is that a person is entitled to hear the case against them. Sadly this did not apply with Prime Time, even though it was challenging the reputation of Cardinal Connell in the most serious way imaginable.

Who you believe in all these cases is up to you. None of these examples of unfairness detract from the sordid truth of sexual abuse in the Dublin diocese. But they do call into question Prime Time’s interest in getting to the truth.

And it leads to one inevitable conclusion: no matter how badly it has handled child sex abuse cases, the Church has nothing to lose from a full-scale, professionally conducted inquiry. Because nobody is well-served by lynch-mob journalism.