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CORRUPTION OF power and the fundamentally rotten nature of relations between the Catholic Church and the State has been laid bare in a damning report into the rape and sexual abuse of children in the Dublin archdiocese over a 30-year period. Denial and cover-up was the order of the day. Nothing changed until the late 1990s when a succession of scandals involving paedophile priests outraged public opinion and forced reforms through the courts, the Oireachtas and the archdiocese itself. There is still a distance to go.

“Repulsive” is a word that comes to mind in considering the response by former Dublin bishops and archbishops to clerical child abuse. As charted by the Murphy commission, the complaints of parents and their children were ignored and other families placed in immediate danger as prelates from John Charles McQuaid onwards suppressed scandals and took refuge in canon law to protect offenders at the expense of innocent children. The vast majority of uninvolved priests turned a blind eye.