CATHOLIC PRIMATE Cardinal Seán Brady was wrong in his handling of 1975 child sex abuse investigations, the head of the church’s child protection watchdog said yesterday.
Ian Elliott, chief executive of the the National Board for Safeguarding Children (NBSC), also said it “would have been helpful” had the cardinal disclosed details of the matter sooner than their disclosure in newspapers last March.
In 1975, the then Fr Brady conducted a canonical investigation into child sex abuse by Fr Brendan Smyth in Kilmore diocese and swore to secrecy the two teenagers involved, whom he believed.
He passed a report on the matter to his bishop, but did nothing more. Smyth continued to abuse children for a further 18 years.
Asked yesterday whether he believed the then Fr Brady had dealt with the matter correctly, Mr Elliott said: “No. He didn’t handle it properly from the safeguarding of children point of view. You could not say that the action taken prioritised the safeguarding of children.”
He was “quite sure if you posed the situation to the cardinal today . . . other actions would have been taken.”
Mr Elliott said he had written to Cardinal Brady following his request on Monday that the NBSC prioritise Armagh archdiocese in its new audit.
The board is about to conduct “ a thorough” all-island audit/review of child protection in the 186 Irish Catholic institutions, beginning with the Northern dioceses. He praised the cardinal’s announcement that he is to appoint a director of child safeguarding in Armagh and his commitment to co-operate with civil authorities on child protection.
On Monday, in its second annual report, the board disclosed that 197 new allegations of child physical, emotional, but mostly sex abuse had been notified to its national office in the year ending March 31st last.
Mr Elliott said he had no benchmark, as yet, against which to “read” that figure but he wondered “how many others are out there?”
In an RTÉ radio interview yesterday, Cardinal Brady referred to himself as “a lame duck cardinal.” Addressing that description of him by John Kelly of Irish Soca, he said “I know that this is painful, even if I am a lame duck cardinal, it is the right thing to do and that’s what I am prepared to do even if it costs me a great personal sacrifice.”
Separately, Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has stood over his address to the Knights of Columbanus last week.
A statement on his behalf yesterday said he stood “by the affirmations in his original speech”. He welcomed the latest NBSC report, saying that “anything less than a totally robust response” to the child abuse issue would “not be enough”.