Experts 'let us down' on sex offenders

Mental health professionals share some of the blame for past clerical sex abuse because they advised the church that abusers …

Mental health professionals share some of the blame for past clerical sex abuse because they advised the church that abusers could be treated and not reoffend, a Catholic bishop has said.

The Bishop of Achonry, Dr Thomas Flynn, accused psychiatrists and psychologists of having "let us all down" when their specialist advice was sought on what to do with offenders.

In separate comments, the Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, said his predecessor in the diocese had appointed a known abuser to parish duties based on "what he believed to be the best expert advice". The priest reoffended, and his victims are believed to have included the late Brendan O'Donnell, convicted of triple murder in 1996.

Dr Flynn made his remarks on Mid-West Radio during an interview in which he also apologised to victims of clerical abuse. But pointing out that most complaints about priests date from a time when there was widespread "ignorance" about the nature of paedophilia, he said: "Psychologists and psychiatrists who acted as advisers to bishops on these matters in the past let us all down. Bishops referred priests known to have committed child sexual abuse to these professionals for counselling, for assessment and for advice, and it was they who came up with the suggestion that these men would be amenable to treatment. It only emerged afterwards that in fact they weren't.

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"I don't want to place blame, but it has to be realised that there was a lot of ignorance abroad on the issue at that time, and when it surfaced, at the beginning, we really did not understand what it was all about.

"It's easy now to look back and say what a terrible thing and why was it allowed to happen, but these were the experts at the time who assured us that these men did not create a danger."

He also said that the problem of abuse "goes much further into the wider community and is not confined to priests, who make up a significant but small percentage of the total number who sexually abuse children".

Dr Walsh was commenting on the case of a Clare priest who had abused children in the US before returning to the diocese of Killaloe in the 1970s.

A local GP has claimed that four young people would still be alive if a former bishop of Killaloe had acted on information about an abusing priest.

In an interview, Dr Walsh said the late Bishop Michael Harty assigned the priest to a parish based on the advice of a psychiatrist that he would not reoffend. In fact the priest did abuse again and was eventually removed from parish duties.

The priest in question was Fr Tom McNamara, also now deceased, whose victims included Brendan O'Donnell, later convicted of the murders of Imelda Riney, her son Liam, and a local curate, Fr Joe Walsh.

Conceding that it was now "very difficult to understand", he said his predecessor had acted on what he considered the best expert advice in reappointing the priest. Dr Harty "sent the priest to a psychiatrist, he warned him, he did go to another parish, and he abused again". Bishops at the time saw sex abuse "as quite wrong and sinful but they did not understand the addictive nature of [ it]", Dr Walsh said.

"I don't think people realised the appalling damage that could be done. I can see no evidence that people understood it and there is plenty of evidence that people didn't understand the addictive nature."

Describing this as a "sad time" for the church, Dr Walsh accepted it would take "a long time" to rebuild public trust: "It is very understandable that people don't trust us at the moment."