Susan O'Keeffe (Labour)

I thank those people who worked to produce the Cloyne report. I also thank those in the church who care about their congregation and who work hard to minister to them and look after them. I commend the joint action taken by the Minister, Deputy Shatter, and by the Minister present, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald, on bringing in new legislation and on the Children First guidelines. I commend particularly the way in which they worked together to do that to show joined up thinking that has been lacking over many years.

Nineteen years ago this month I made a television programme called "Sins of the Fathers" and it was the first time that the matter of child sex abuse was brought to the public's attention. What it showed clearly 19 years ago was that the Catholic Church hid its guilty priests and brothers or moved them on, or both. It looked after priests rather than victims and it ostracised those within the church who tried to speak out and encourage a different culture, and they were prepared to go to court to defend their priests against victims.

Here we are, on a hot summer's day, 19 years later, and what do we know today? We know exactly those same truths, some of them in the Cloyne report and some in other reports. Make no mistake, many of the stories that contain other truths will never be recorded and can now never be recorded. It was clear from the outset what was going on with the church yet it has taken us 19 long and tortuous years to arrive at exactly where we were.

What the Cloyne report brings, however, is a dispassionate and detailed account of the failings of an organisation to discharge its duties that it knew it ought to discharge. It was and is no ordinary organisation. It is one that set itself up to bring the love of God, no less, to millions of people and to preach salvation through a certain morality.

There is one small sentence in the Cloyne report. It states: "Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008...". Instead, the Catholic hierarchy has caused millions of euro to be spent on reports - the Cloyne report cost €1.9 million - while they failed to pay their share of the costs, and argued over whether they should pay at all. They have punished victims again and again by lying in private and public and by keeping quiet until investigation forced shreds of the stories from them, sometimes refusing to give information to people. They have hidden behind their power, their privilege and their education for years, and they are still doing it. They have ultimately twisted the core morality of the Christian faith, the one I was given as a child - love thy neighbour as thyself.

In the end we have seen individual priests rightly stand trial but the church hierarchy, those who run the organisation, the red hats, have escaped. They carry on behaving with the authority of a state. Indeed, they are a state with poison as its lifeblood. It is corrupt and malfunctioning to believe it still has those rights because they lost those rights a very long time ago the first time they covered up for a priest who abused a child. We did not know about that then, but we do now.

We must have the pursuit of proper accountability for our people. Those who rule and run the church, the executive of the church, must answer for what they have done because without that accountability this will remain a story of individual priests and individual pain, and that is a lie. It was far more than that.