The state also failed our children

I FEEL again compelled to take issue with the nature of political, press and interest group reaction to the Cloyne Report and the ongoing fallout in terms of the Vatican’s relations with Ireland.

Firstly, Kenny’s speech, while appropriate in addressing the historic and cultural stranglehold which an imperious Catholic Church held over Irish society for too long, was inappropriate and indeed misleading in its specifics.

He overstates the findings of Judge Yvonne Murphy’s Commission when he speaks of “the rape and torture of children”. Those terms would be more appropriately applied to what happened to the children in Sligo, Galway and Roscommon and doubtlessly elsewhere under the aegis of state bodies.