Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I move amendment No. 1:

To delete ''deplores the Vatican's intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops;'' and substitute the following:

''profoundly regrets the Vatican's intervention in 1997 which contributed to the undermining in the Cloyne diocese of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish Bishops;

also regrets the absence of satisfactory national guidelines in this State prior to 1999 concerning the reporting of knowledge or suspicion of child abuse, and regrets that Oireachtas Éireann has not yet enacted legislation to compel such reporting and to underpin inter-agency sharing of information;

notes the 2001 Motu proprio from the Vatican Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith which reformed the Church's handling of abuse cases and notes that, since then and as evidenced by the approval of the US bishops' 'Essential Norms' document in December 2002, the Vatican has supported national church policies which require compliance with national civil laws on reporting abuse allegations;

notes the Commission of Investigation's acknowledgement that the standards adopted by the Church in Ireland are 'high standards which, if fully implemented, would afford proper protection to children' and that the 'standards set by the State are less precise and more difficult to implement';

affirms the work of the National Board for Safeguarding Children established by the Irish Bishops Conference, the Conference of Religious in Ireland and the Irish Missionary Union and urges all the relevant religious authorities to co-operate fully with its work;''.

I welcome the Minister to the House and commend her on what was a fine speech, which I have read. In moving my amendment I want to make it clear that I agree with almost everything in the all-party motion and I acknowledge there was much in the Taoiseach's speech of last week made in support of the same Dáil motion with which I would agree.

Both the motion and the Taoiseach's speech justly highlight the plight of the victims of child sex abuse, the disastrous and infuriating failure of the church in Cloyne to safeguard properly against clerical sex abuse, and the Vatican letter of 1997, which contributed to the undermining of child protection guidelines in Cloyne.

It is worth mentioning at this juncture that the Cloyne diocese may not be alone in its failure since 1996. We await the publication of audits into other dioceses, and I take this opportunity to heartily express my wish that any bishop or church leader who did not implement church guidelines on this issue since they were promulgated in late 1995-early 1996 should leave office forthwith and not wait for the findings of an audit to make their dereliction of duty clear.

The Government's motion also points to the important and laudable strides made and being made by the State in strengthening protection for children against both predatory abusers and institutional torpor and apathy, yet I take issue with aspects of the motion, and hence the reason I submitted an amendment, and I thank my colleagues who have supported it.

A clear presupposition of the motion is that the church and the church alone is at fault in the area of child sex abuse while the State and the State only is making progress in regard to the protection of vulnerable children. Nowhere does the motion acknowledge church progress on the issue and nowhere does it acknowledge State failure. Despite what Senator van Turnhout and others have said, honesty and critical appraisal matters, and while a fair assessment of church and State culpability is of lesser importance than the justice due to persons sexually abused by clergy, facilitated by the gravely inadequate behaviour of certain church authorities, it still matters, and not simply because we as legislators have a duty towards objectivity, even-handedness and truth. It matters because a fair assessment of where both church and State went wrong and where they are going now is essential for formulating best policy, law and practice to protect children.

The pretence exhibited by the Government's motion that failure in child protection belongs somehow exclusively to the church contributes to a culture of complacency within Government and State agencies and in turn draws society's attention and media scrutiny away from the gross abuse of children currently taking place under the watch of the State and without its needed intervention.

Examples of State failure concerning child abuse include the lack of inter-agency co-operation, the failure of many Health Service Executive areas to implement the Children First guidelines properly, the Roscommon and Galway abuse cases, and the neglect motivating the current investigation into the deaths of almost 200 young people in the care of the HSE in the past decade, yet there has been nothing like the pressure on the State to get its house in order as there has been on the church. There have been no resignations, nor has there been a concerted media campaign calling for such recommendations. I do not remember any judge-led commissions established to report on the abuses overseen by contemporary State agencies. Instead, we get a self-congratulatory, all-party motion on the progress being made on the Government side. We get a motion deploring the Vatican letter of 1997 critical of mandatory reporting, a motion which ignores the fact that the State still has not legislated for mandatory reporting and expressed similar doubts in 1996 under the then Fine Gael Minister for children, Austin Currie.

That is simple hypocrisy and by unfairly imputing mala fide on the part of the Vatican by employing the term "deplore" for the Cloyne report, which is what I rely on for the definitive version of events, it makes no such accusation. This motion conveniently side-steps genuine difficulties with mandatory reporting, difficulties the Government still seems to be vaguely aware of except when it is targeting the church's own expressed doubts about mandatory reporting. That is why Senator Van Turnhout is wrong to say that our focus today must be on the church exclusively, if that is what she is suggesting. This entire motion extols what the State proposes to do and therefore that argument simply does not hold water.

The motion makes no mention of the strides being made by the church in regard to child protection, achievements the Cloyne report documents. It makes no mention of the current guidelines that according to the Cloyne report are superior to those of the State, and it makes no mention of the highly encouraging work of the National Board for Safeguarding Children.

This is not simply a matter of adding balance to the debate. By ignoring areas where the church has succeeded as opposed to failing miserably the State potentially blinds itself to valuable lessons. That again contributes to State complacency and shields it from its own failings. Church complacency on child protection, as the Cloyne report reminds us had, and in some thankfully diminishing cases continues to have, devastating consequences. That is no reason to assume that State complacency in the area of child protection is any more benign. We as legislators have a duty to guard against State complacency and we fail in that duty by passing this motion unamended.

The Taoiseach's speech changes the context in which we are debating this motion, the same motion accepted by the Dáil. I would like to acknowledge that none of us can ever do enough to appreciate fully the horror of child abuse and the particular horror that is child abuse by ministers of the church. The writer Stephen Rossetti titled a book on the subject, "Slayer of the Soul".