Cloyne, a palpable anger and new determination

“I remember the palpable anger among a number of bishops when this was brought to our attention first three years ago by our own National Board for the Safeguarding of Children in the Catholic Church, that we were all trying in our own diocese to implement these procedures and find that our credibility was then being undermined because that was not being followed in one particular diocese”, says auxiliary bishop of Down and Connor, Bishop Donal Mckeown, in reaction to Wednesday’s publishing of the government commissioned report into the handling of allegations of abuse in Diocese of Cloyne, Ireland.

He adds “I suppose that the positive element of what happened today is that this lack of compliance by the diocese of Cloyne with our own national procedures, actually was discovered by our own national board, and there the state commission was set up on the basis of information that the Church board had actually supplied to the public authorities”.

The report described the failure of the diocese to report allegations of abuse in the period 1996-2009 as a ‘great failure’. It also criticised the Bishop John Magee (who resigned from the pastoral leadership of the diocese in 2008) “for having failed to oversee the implementation of the Church's own guidelines on the handling and reporting of allegations”.

Speaking to Emer McCarthy Bishop McKeown reaffirms the determination of the Church in Ireland to be “as transparent as possible both to our own internal bodies and to the civil authorities, to ensure that in Ireland we can create an environment where firstly, children are aware of what is abuse and what is not acceptable and secondly, that children can also be sure that when they go to statutory authorities, or to Church authorities their complaints will be taken seriously and followed through”. Listen