Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael)

I welcome the Ferns Report. It sets out in black and white what many of us have known for a long time is happening in Irish society. It is a pity this report cannot be more widely available to people. Even I was shocked by the physical descriptions of some of the abuse when put down in black and white. We suspected many of the cases were taking place right across the country but I am shocked to see it written in a Government report.

There are many reasons people look away, and continue to look away, when faced with the appalling issue of child abuse. The Ferns Report has focused on clerical sexual abuse in one diocese and has found 100 cases. I believe there are many more that have not been reported for a number of reasons, even within the diocese of Ferns. If County Wexford which makes up most of the diocese of Ferns contains 3% of the population, and assuming the rest of the country is exactly the same, then a nationwide report would unearth up to 3,000 cases of clerical sexual abuse, a huge figure by any estimation.

We are told clerical sex abuse cases only make up 5% of the total amount of child sexual abuse cases in the country. If we were to use that figure, it means more than 60,000 Irish children have been abused during the past few decades. This is an appalling vista that begs the question why so many people continued to look away, especially those who were in positions of power and who must have known so much about what was going on. Why did they all look away?

There is no doubt that many, clergy included, were never aware of issues such as child sexual abuse. I made inquiries in Wexford from people who attended St. Peter's College in Wexford around that time. Most of those were aware there were priests who had to be watched out for but were not aware of the extent of the abuse taking place. There were many others who would have known many of the priests named in the report and would never have suspected there was anything untoward about them or that they would have been involved in anything so criminal. Genuinely, people did not know what was going on. There were others, clergy and lay people alike, who said they were aware that inappropriate behaviour was taking place but for a number of reasons said nothing about it. We should try to tease out why nothing was said about it. Sometimes it has to do with the sort of society we had at the time. To make allegations against a priest would have brought more trouble to the person making the allegation than it would have brought to the abuser of young children. There was the risk of being sued if one made allegations that one could not substantiate. Two points have borne that out: legislation from 1998 giving protection to people who make these allegations and, as stated by Deputy O'Donnell, the fact that so many of the prosecutions fail. People were very slow, certainly in the 1980s when I was growing up, to make these allegations. For many of the victims and their families the shame of what happened often drove them to try to cover it up. They did not want to report it and did not want it out in the public domain. It was not so much about prosecutions, they simply did not want people to know that a member of their family had been abused in such a way. Regrettably, it was an issue that was covered up by all parts of society.

However, there were those who knew what was going on and its extent and did nothing about it. They may well have known that crimes had been committed that warranted serious criminal charges and they still did nothing about it. A serious point that has not been teased out in the report is why many in authority were aware of extremely serious crimes being committed against children and did nothing about it. It is not good enough for them to say things were different in those days. They were the people in charge and the people who could have done something about it. All my life, like many in the House, I have had close associations with the Catholic Church when growing up. I went to Mass and served as an altar boy and would have been in close contact with a number of priests. As a teenager I attended a religious boarding school and would have been in regular contact with members of the clergy. Of all the members of the clergy I came across as a child and as a teenager I am aware of only one priest whom we had been warned by other students to stay away from. After six or seven months in the boarding school and following allegations of certain behaviour the priest was moved to another parish and was subsequently prosecuted for the crime of child sexual abuse when he was working as a priest in a parish. Is this practice still continuing? If so, what is being done about it? It is quite possible that priests are still being moved around when they are causing problems in a parish or allegations are being made against them. We need to know whether this practice has been stopped and what the bishops, as the people in charge, are doing about it.

We have much to learn from history. In 1985 a document entitled Building on Reality was published. This was a Government policy document covering the years 1985 to 1989 and gave rise to the Child Care Act. It is strange that no mention was made of child sexual abuse in many of those policy documents, even though in 1987 the Department of Health issued child abuse guidelines clarifying procedural issues and giving responsibility to the health boards. A 1989 report of cases investigated by health boards stated that 34% were classified as sexual abuse; 8% were classified as emotional abuse; 11% were classified as physical abuse; and 47% were classified as neglect of children. Throughout the 1980s the Government was aware what was going on, given that the Department of Health was issuing guidelines and the health boards were publishing reports on the issue. A charge of "See no evil, hear no evil" might have been made against legislators and those with a role in political life. I am surprised that the matter was left out of policy documents between 1985 and 1989.

While the public representatives might not have been on the ball regarding what they should have been doing, it was scandalous that between 1987 and 1989, as detailed in the report, most of the dioceses took out insurance to protect themselves from being sued by victims of abuse. The bishops have hard questions to answer in this regard. Why did they take this course of action without at the same time introducing child protection guidelines to protect children with whom they had extremely close contact at the time? The same is true of vulnerable adults for the care of whom many of the religious institutions had responsibility. The Ferns Report states that very few files were available in the diocese of Ferns prior to 1990. Why was the diocese taking out insurance if it did not have any files available?

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