THERE WERE “real issues” around the failure of the Catholic hierarchy to co-operate with the church’s own child protection review, the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said last night.
In January 2009 the Irish Catholic Bishops, the Conference of Religious of Ireland (Cori) and the Irish Missionary Union (IMU) asked their own child protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children (NBSC), to undertake a review of all church institutions in Ireland.
It followed an NBSC report on Cloyne diocese, published the previous month, which found child protection practices there to be “inadequate and in some respects dangerous”. It prompted the Government in early January 2009 to extend the remit of the Murphy commission to investigate the handling of clerical child abuse allegations in Cloyne. Its report is expected shortly.
“Data protection issues are real issues,” Archbishop Martin said last night, and that where the review was concerned “the whole question of the legality [of passing on such data by church authoritie] was raised by lawyers for the NBSC,” he said.
“There is a real problem with passing on such [sensitive] information to non-statutory third parties, especially in Northern Ireland. Fines under British data protection legislation are enormous,” he said. Lawyers for church authorities and the NBSC had now worked out how there could be co-operation in such a review, he said, but he could understand NBSC chief executive Ian Elliott’s frustration with the length of time this had taken. They “found a way out that leaves the bishop or religious superior in the driving seat” when it came to the provision of such information, he said.
In its annual report for the year ended March 31st, 2011, published on Wednesday, the NBSC said that until recently it was prevented from undertaking the review requested, by legal concerns on the part of church authorities.
It also disclosed that funding for the board’s training programmes in child protection, requested by church authorities, was withdrawn by the church last October, and that 219 new allegations of clerical child abuse made to the church authorities were withheld from the board until recently.
Where funding for training was concerned, Archbishop Martin said that, rather than costs for this coming from the NBSC budget, it was decided that those who availed of such training should be billed for it.
He could not explain why over three-quarters of the 272 new allegations received by church authorities in the year to March 31st last had not been passed on to the NBSC until the last minute. “Perhaps the NBSC should be in greater contact with the dioceses or superiors,” he suggested.
