Madam, – The letters of the past week or so regarding the Murphy report have seen a level of hysteria that I have never seen before in all my days reading the Letters page.
So far these have asked various branches of the church to hand over schools for €1, for the Government to bring back the death penalty and for the ordinary God-fearing church-going people to go on strike and not attend Mass.
May I remind everyone of the 2002 Report into Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI). It stated that 3.2 per cent of all Irish children who are sexually abused were harmed by clerics.
I fully realise the Catholic Church has done wrong in allowing this type of abuse to go on for three decades, there is no excuse for that kind of behaviour. I do believe full weight of the law has to fall on anyone who carried out these crimes.
As a card-carrying member of the Catholic Church I am ashamed and disappointed that a church I belong to was party to this type of crime, but I also realise that the church has done a lot of good in this country and that the sins of the minority should not be visited on the majority. This is called a balanced analysis of the situation, something that some letter writers have sadly omitted.
As a country, we have to look at ourselves and ask why such a huge level of child abuse exists in Ireland? Yes the church has huge questions to answer, but we have to face up the fact that 95 per cent of abuse of children is carried out by non-religious people, and this can include teachers, doctors, gardaí, journalists, boxing coaches and block-layers. – Yours, etc,