ON RTÉ RADIO 1's This Weekprogramme last Sunday Minister for Justice Alan Shatter told Gavin Jennings that the Cloyne report would go before the Cabinet on Tuesday, July 12th, and be published "very shortly thereafter".
The Cloyne report was presented to the former minister, Dermot Ahern, on December 23rd last year and the Murphy commission (or, to give it its full title, the Commission of Investigation, Dublin Archdiocese, Catholic Diocese of Cloyne) was wound up the following week.
So why the delay, of almost seven months, in bringing the report before Cabinet? It was received initially by a government that was keenly aware of being in its death throes and was seemingly paralysed by this fact. There was also the complication that one of the 19 priests investigated by the Murphy commission in Cloyne has been appearing before the courts on child-abuse charges, meaning that, for legal reasons, some details of his case cannot be disclosed.
The present Government inherited this situation when it took office on March 9th. On April 8th the report was brought before the president of the High Court, Mr Justice Nicholas Kearns, who decided that parts of chapter nine, which deal with the priest referred to above, should not be published pending the outcome of proceedings in his case.
Since then there has been much confusion. Lawyers for the priest and lawyers for the State could not agree on how to interpret the judge’s decision as to which parts of chapter nine should not be published. There was speculation at different times that the lawyers were returning to the High Court to secure a definitive decision from Mr Justice Kearns, or that the lawyers had agreed the changes to chapter nine among themselves and publication would follow within days, or that the lawyers had decided to await the outcome of the priest’s court appearances. It went on.
The result was what Shatter described last Sunday as a delay in publication due to “a long-drawn-out process of consultation involving lawyers who had an interest in the matter”.
What we do know about the Cloyne report is that it contains 26 chapters and is about 400 pages long, and that it includes findings on all 19 of the priests who faced abuse allegations there over the 13-year period investigated. That period stretched from January 1st, 1996, when the Catholic Church in Ireland first introduced child-protection guidelines, to February 1st, 2009.
The genesis of the report was a direction by the government in January 2009 that the remit of the Murphy commission, then investigating the Dublin archdiocese, be extended to include the Cloyne diocese. This decision followed the previous month’s publication of a report on the Cloyne diocesan website that found child-protection practices there to be “inadequate and in some respects dangerous”. The report was the result of an investigation by the Catholic Church’s child-protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children, in 2008. The board’s findings were shocking, not least because they illustrated a reckless attitude to child protection on the part of the then bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who has since resigned.
The investigation found that Magee, who had been bishop of Cloyne since 1987, allowed the Catholic Church’s guidelines on child protection to be ignored in his diocese despite being party to their introduction in 1996 and to their updating in 2000 and 2005. It also found that the diocesan policy when allegations arose was to provide minimal information to the gardaí and the health authorities. In instances where it did provide information to the civil authorities the diocese named the victim but not the priest alleged to have carried out the abuse.
According to the church’s watchdog, Magee’s diocese “failed to act effectively to limit the access to children by individuals against whom credible allegations of child sexual abuse had been made”. The board’s report stated that, following allegations against a priest, meetings of Cloyne’s child-protection management committee were “apparently focused on the needs of the accused priest”. There was “no documentary evidence that the risk to vulnerable children was discussed or considered at any time”, it said.
When the church published its report on December 19th, 2008, Alan Shatter, then Fine Gael’s spokesman on children, described it as “a damning indictment of the failure on the part of church authorities to implement essential child-protection procedures”. It was, he added, “incomprehensible that 10 years after publication of the Children First child-protection guidelines and after two decades of revelations of clerical sexual abuse, there remains at the highest levels a pervasive culture of cover-up and secrecy”.
Prior to the publication of the revelations in the report, Cloyne’s Case Management Advisory Committee on child protection threatened the board with legal action. In a letter to the watchdog, the committee said: “We shall have no choice but to seek remedies in either ecclesiastical or secular courts, or both.”
Two of the letter’s 10 signatories are likely to feature significantly in the Cloyne report. They are Msgr Denis O’Callaghan, who was bishop Magee’s child-protection delegate in Cloyne at the time, and the solicitor Diarmaid Ó Catháin. In February 2008 Ó Catháin was the solicitor for Cardinal Desmond Connell when he attempted in the High Court to prevent Diarmuid Martin, his successor as Archbishop of Dublin, handing over documents to the Murphy commission. At the time the commission was investigating the handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations against a sample 46 priests in the Dublin archdiocese. It published its Dublin report in November 2009.
Cardinal Connell was persuaded to drop his High Court action following intervention by the Catholic primate, Cardinal Seán Brady. The documents were handed over.
