Ireland awaits mammoth report on decades of child abuse by Dublin priests, Catholic cover-ups

Irish await report on Dublin priests’ child abuse

DUBLIN — The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland faced another day of recriminations Thursday as the government prepared to publish an investigation into why child abuse by Dublin priests went unchecked for decades.

The investigation focuses on cover-ups in the Dublin Archdiocese, and is one of several government inquiries ordered after the chronic child rape, beatings and other cruelty was revealed in Catholic-run schools, children’s workhouses and orphanages. The first major priest-pedophilia court case in 1994 triggered the collapse of the government of the day. More than 15,000 abuse victims have since come forward to pursue claims.

Thursday’s report looks into the circumstances under which 46 Dublin priests were able to molest or rape children in 1975-2004. It names only abusers who have died or been convicted, giving aliases for the majority yet to face justice — including two priests soon facing trial.

The report will “shock us all,” said Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who has said the church identified more than 150 suspected child-abusers in Dublin since 1940.

Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat, handed over more than 60,000 confidential church files on abuse as part of the three-year investigation, after his predecessor Cardinal Demond Connell dropped a lawsuit last year to keep more than 5,500 files locked in the archbishop’s private vault.

The report is certain to implicate Martin’s four predecessors as complicit in a culture of cover-up that protected the church’s reputation.

Another report published in May detailed the decades of abuse at Catholic schools, workhouses and orphanages — institutions run by orders of brothers and nuns operating independently of bishops, but like the church often unchallenged by the state.

Counseling services run by charities have since logged record-high levels of calls. The charities on Thursday were being allowed early viewing of the new report, which exceeds 700 pages.