Abstract
This article has been adapted from the 3rd Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne on 7 March 2013.
 
 Ireland has been overwhelmed in the past two decades by what the Catholic Church itself has called ‘a tsunami’ of revelations of clerical child abuse – physical as well as sexual – of the meticulous concealment of abuse and abusers and of a long-established, and almost universal policy of protecting the assets and reputation of the Church, in preference to exposing the abusers. Between 2006 and 2009 Judge Yvonne Murphy chaired a Commission of Inquiry into the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.
Highlights
Historic is a term from which professional historians traditionally recoil, and rightly so
Dealings are conducted by a civil servant in Dublin, who has other tasks as well
Two were accepted. b) The Bishop of Cloyne resigned, as did the Bishop of Ferns. c) New legislation[10] was enacted making it an offence to withhold information on certain serious offences where those offences are committed against a child or vulnerable adult. They include most sexual offences. d) New vetting procedures for those working with children were enacted. e) The Pope issued a pastoral letter of apology[11] to the people of Ireland and arranged for an apostolic visit by Vatican appointed officials to help the local church on its path to renewal. f) New guidelines for safeguarding children were introduced by the Catholic Church and audits conducted on their implementation. g) A number of successful prosecutions were taken against perpetrators. h) A Memorial is being erected in memory of those children who were abused
Summary
1993 was the year the dam burst, as far as allegations of clerical sexual abuse were concerned. In 1993 Fr Brendan Smith, a Norbertine monk, was convicted on numerous counts of the sexual abuse of children going back more than thirty-five years The clerical authorities, it transpired, had known about this for a long time, but just kept moving him or letting him move around from his monastery just south of the border, to various locations north of the border and back again. The focus of the allegations broadened to include not merely the priests and their superiors; but the civil authorities, notably the police and the Health Boards, who were seen by complainants as not having responded adequately In parallel to these developments, other, less obvious, changes were taking place. This, more or less, was the situation in Ireland, and in Dublin in particular, when in March 2006 I was asked to head a Commission of Inquiry into clerical child abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese and the reaction of the authorities, civil as well as ecclesiastical, to it
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