No abuser of children is above the law

IN response to the decades of clerical child abuse to which the church authorities and law makers acquiesced, I declare that the time for revolutionary speeches has long since passed and subsequently action is necessitated.

Although Enda Kenny’s speech was welcome, it fails to address the central issue: the failure on the part of Irish legislature to foresee and act on the part of its people where situations of abuse were being reported and ignored.

Through this failure the legislature upheld the idea of elitism in which church officials hold themselves above the letter of the law. Mr Kenny in his speech describes clearly the, “dysfunction, disconnection and elitism ... the narcissism ... that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day”.