Seanad Report:The Government should contact the Papal Nuncio and demand that the Vatican issue a view on the Ferns report, Joe O'Toole (Ind) said.
Given that the report was the worst they had seen on a Catholic diocese on the issue of child sex abuse, it was unacceptable that there had been an absolute silence from Rome.
"As the leader of the Irish diplomatic corps in the Vatican, the Irish Papal Nuncio should recognise that he has a role to play in this regard. We need to hear from him on this matter."
Voicing concern over the disappearance of Garda files after a chief superintendent had insisted on getting them, Mr O'Toole said the officer had been a major figure in the Knights of St Columbanus. "They are connected to the Ferns affair and should tell us their view on the matter."
Mr O'Toole said that decent, good and honourable priests should be allowed to take wives if that was what they wished to do. The clergy should grow up and recognise that there was nothing wrong with being a homosexual and being a practising homosexual priest. If married priests were recognised and gay priests were accepted, we would have identified and focused the extent of the problem in this regard.
Don Lydon (FF) said he had been professionally involved with some of those mentioned in the report. "I wonder why some of the psychological reports and psychiatric reports available at the time never came into the hands of the inquiry."
For the past 30 years he had conducted psychological assessments of candidates for religious life for both the Catholic Church and the Church of Ireland.
"In the early days some of the hierarchy would not listen to us when we produced our reports. They believed that it was God's will that if a person applied to enter the priesthood he should be allowed to do so regardless of the circumstances. Gradually they learned that we were right and they were not."
The Ferns report stated that there was no definitive test to assess a person's suitability for the priesthood, added Mr Lydon. However, he certainly knew what would make a bad one. He had never been wrong in a diagnosis in 30 years. Many of the beliefs that prevailed at the time were extraordinary.
"For example, I met priests who believed that they would not break their vow of celibacy if they had sex with a male."
Many priests who had abused children had been sexually immature to a degree that one could not possibly imagine unless one met them.
Expressing the view that effective remedial action could be taken, Mr Lydon said a number of steps must be taken to prevent a repetition, including the undergoing by every candidate for religious life of a comprehensive psychological assessment.
Most important, during training due emphasis must be given to the development of a mature adult approach to sexuality.
Strongly criticising what she termed the silence from Rome over the Ferns report, Geraldine Feeney (FF) said it was sickening to the core that it had not been mentioned. Perhaps the Irish church was too small and the new Pope had "not even thought about us.
"The mother church in Rome owes it to us and owes it more to the victims of clerical abuse, to come out and apologise. If they are not going to say sorry they should at least recognise the Ferns report and the level of political debate that is taking place as a result of it."