The Church always pays for the sins of the past

COMMENTING on what I said in a BBC radio discussion on the Ryan Report, Fergus Finlay (Irish Examiner, 09.06.09) accused me of trying “to sustain the argument, in the light of everything we know, that the abuse of decades was the work of a few misplaced rotten apples”.

Nothing could be father from my mind. I make no excuse for what happened.

The radio discussion arose from a short article I wrote outlining in very general terms what appear to me to be those aspects of traditional Irish Catholicism that led to what I called the reign of terror in the industrial schools.