The Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, has said it was not possible for the archdiocese to confirm a priest's admission of clerical child sex abuse to gardaí due to the absence of a formal warning to the priest that the admission could be used in evidence against him.
Such a warning was "a fundamental principle of law", the cardinal said, and as it had not been given, it was not felt proper to confirm the admission to the Garda investigation.
He was responding to an allegation by Ms Marie Collins on RTÉ television's Prime Time programme last week.
She said the then chancellor of the Dublin archdiocese, Mgr Alex Stenson, had confirmed to her in 1995 that Father Paul McGennis had admitted sexually abusing her in 1960 when she was 13 and a patient in Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Dublin.
Father McGennis was chaplain there.
But the chancellor refused to make a statement to the Garda on McGennis's admission. Neither would the archdiocese hand over McGennis's file, later found to contain evidence that the Dublin church authorities knew about the priest's behaviour as far back as 1960, she said.
In 1996, months after the Irish bishops had issued strict guidelines on clerical child sex abuse, which advised immediate reporting to civil authorities by bishops of complaints about clerical child sex abuse, Ms Collins met Archbishop Connell about the matter.
She challenged him about the archdiocese's non-co-operation with the Garda investigation. She said he told her he was acting on legal advice not to co-operate.
McGennis was eventually sentenced to 18 months in jail for his crimes.
The cardinal also said that what he told Ms Collins concerning the guidelines was not that they had no force in either canon or civil law, as she claimed, but in fact they superseded both canon and civil law.
He said he would be issuing a statement on both matters "in the very near future". The reason for his delay in responding to her allegations was because he wished to be "very careful" of not "increasing the suffering and being seen to be increasing the suffering" of "someone who has suffered as a victim". He did not wish to "engage in controversy" with a victim and felt he should "be given some consideration for delicacy" in the matter.
