There can hardly be a more battered group on the island these days than the 26 men who make up the current Irish Catholic Bishops Conference, popularly referred to as the hierarchy. In recent years, and primarily as a result of their handling of child sex abuse cases, they have attracted criticism from all sides, not least their own priests.

Last May, Reading The Signs Of The Times, a survey of 323 priests in the Dublin archdiocese conducted by the Dublin Diocesan Council of Priests, found that the most important source of stress in their lives was "general church leadership".

An Ireland On Sunday/MRC poll, published on October 12th last, found that 44 per cent of those polled believed the bishops were doing "a bad job". In a sense the bishops have become everybody's favourite scapegoats.

Part of this results from the fallout which followed a torrent of child sex abuse cases involving priests and religious, since 1994 in particular. They handled the crisis belatedly and badly.

Each bishop runs what is effectively an independent republic, which will not countenance interference from another. As a group the bishops meet just three times a year and apart from that they function alone. A perception that they always act in concert is therefore wrong. It was probably this decentralised structure which contributed more than anything else to a perceived and maddening tardiness in their response to the initial child sex abuse cases. By the time they acted together great damage had already been done to them collectively.

That initial delay in response was perceived by many as suggesting the bishops were more concerned with protecting the institution than with giving succour to the victim/s. As a result the Catholic Church in Ireland has undergone what Father Gabriel Daly has called "institutional disrepute". Speaking at the a.g.m. of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) last June he said: "We belong to a church which as an institution (his emphasis) rarely if ever admits to having been wrong or to having inflicted harm on people. Reform in the Catholic Church," he continued, "is normally by amnesia . . .". That was why church spokespeople have often proved inept and visibly uncomfortable in their handling of these scandals, he said, their training had conditioned them to defend the institutional church "against even the most reasonable and justifiable criticism". That sense of institutional arrogance has also contributed significantly to the depth of anger felt by so many people towards the Church generally.

The 26 men of the current Irish Bishops Conference (there are a further 10 auxiliary bishops) are highly institutionalised human beings. The oldest member is Dr Brooks, Bishop of Dromore, who is 73, while the youngest is Dr Neary, Archbishop of Tuam, who is 51. The Archbishop of Armagh, and primate of All-Ireland, Dr Brady is 58. Their average age is 62, which means that the vast majority of them are children of the 1940s and 1950s, when the church here was at its most powerful. By then it had achieved in Ireland, as Father Daly put it in his CORI talk, "the sort of power which Roman canonists could only dream about. Its word was law and its authority was often exercised in a way that was bigoted, puritanical and philistine."

It was in that climate that our average 62-year-old bishop realised he had a vocation to the priesthood. He would have been born in 1935, entered Maynooth in 1952 approximately, and been ordained circa 1959. His mind and priesthood was formed pre-Vatican 2, which is not to say he was not influenced by Vatican 2. The average one comes from a farming or small town background and attended the local diocesan college, from where he went to Maynooth, before either continuing with further study at home or abroad, or getting some pastoral experience, or all of the above. Generally he then became a teacher/lecturer, as often as not in his own old diocesan college, where he went on to become president. It was from that role he was elevated to bishop of his diocese in his early 40s.

He is a scholarly, reserved man, with considerable administrative experience and a conservative outlook on life. He has spent most, if not all, of his life in some church institution or other, usually a school or college. One of the most remarkable features of his preparation is his general lack of pastoral experience.

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