CATHOLIC ARCHBISHOP of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has spoken of an encounter with "a dirty old man" when he was 12 in an interview with New York Timescolumnist Maureen Dowd.
Asked whether he had ever been abused, he told her how “one day when I was waiting on my mother . . . I must have been about 12, this dirty old man came up and said the most horrendous things to me in the public street, and he had me sort of pinned against the wall and I could do very little about it. I was getting very upset, and I saw a policeman coming, and I called the policeman and the man ran away.”
He said when he was growing up his mother always told him: “Go serve your Mass but don’t hang around with the priest.”
In the article “An Archbishop Burns While Rome Fiddles”, Dowd reports that “in his brusque way, he rejects the appellation of hero. “‘Nobody could have read what I have read and not did what I did,’ he said as he walked me out into the windy spring day. ‘If I didn’t react to the stories I heard, there would be something wrong’.”
She wrote how, as he told one story, the Archbishop “was beginning to sniffle. He could not get through a story about ‘a really nasty man’ . . . without pulling out his handkerchief and wiping his nose. ‘He built a swimming pool in his own garden, to which only boys of a certain age, of a certain appearance, were allowed into it’,” he told her.
“There were eight other priests in that parish, and not one of them seemed to think there was something strange about it,” he said.
Two years after the Murphy report, she said “the Irish are still angry and appalled. The only church leader who escapes their disgust is the no-nonsense, multilingual Martin.”
The Archbishop told her “one of the things that annoys me is when I see a priest get convicted, the newspapers try to get the most devilish photographs of them. The trouble is that child sexual abusers don’t look like devils.”
