The criminal law offence of misprision of felony - the failure to report a serious crime - appears to have been abolished under legislation introduced five years ago, the Minister for Justice said yesterday.
Speaking on the current Catholic Church sex abuse controversy, Mr McDowell said that the Criminal Law Act of 1997 "did seem to abolish" the offence. But, even if it had not, he said, the offence "may not have been very apt" in the circumstances.
The Act in question is open to legal interpretation, as it does not explicitly revoke the offence. Section 2 of the Act, however, abolishes the distinction between a felony and a misdemeanour, thereby effectively removing misprision of felony from the statute books.
Speaking on RTÉ Radio's Today with Pat Kenny programme yesterday, Mr McDowell said that exceptions to the law on misprision had been conferred on lawyers, parents, spouses and, in some cases, ecclesiastical authorities.
The Minister is examining whether the law in question can be applied retrospectively, prospectively or at all. Under the 1997 Act, two new offences of assisting or concealing an offence were created. Meanwhile, the Offences Against the State Amendment Act, 1998, made it an offence to fail to report any serious offence, namely an offence which carries a jail term of five years or more. The latter piece of legislation was introduced in the wake of the Omagh bombing as a counter-terrorism measure and it explicitly excluded sexual crimes from its scope.
Mr McDowell stressed that canon law had "no particular status" under civil law, and he was "surprised and disappointed" at suggestions to the contrary in Catholic writings. "The fact is that we live in a republic. There is only one law to which all of us are subject, and even though canon lawyers have a huge expertise in their own area, the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church is viewed by the civil law of this State as equivalent to the laws of, say, the Presbyterian Church, or the internal rules of a sporting organisation."
