We in media must face up to our own abuse demons

Ireland is the most media-saturated country in the world. But that saturation doesn’t supply variety. For example, radio, on the afternoon the Ferns Report came out, offered an infinity of choices but no alternative. If you went for talk radio, you got a bucketful of Ferns, no matter where you went on the dial.

Of course, the story had a lot going for it. It had sex (albeit perverted), power (albeit fading from the Church), money (in pay-outs), secrets (the legal agreements attached to the pay-outs) and children. But most of all, it had villains. Individual villains like Sean Fortune. Institutional villains like the system allowing men like Fortune to operate.

Media itself, of course, was not to blame in any way. Media would like to ring-fence what happened in Ferns and elsewhere as a product of the institutional church alone. The reality is that media played and continues to play a contributory part in this saga.