European human rights court faults Ireland on abortion ban
The European Court of Human Rights ruled against Ireland on Thursday for stopping a Lithuanian cancer sufferer from terminating a pregnancy, in a blow to the predominantly Catholic country and its tough abortion laws. In a final ruling, the rights court found Ireland had not respected the privacy and family rights of the Lithuanian woman, who was living in Ireland and feared a pregnancy could trigger a relapse of her cancer, in remission at the time.
The court, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg, ordered Ireland to pay 15,000 euros ($19,840) in damages to the woman, who was forced to travel to Britain, where the laws are more liberal, to have an abortion. Terminating a pregnancy has long been a fraught issue in Ireland, where some of the toughest abortion laws in Europe allow terminations only when the mother’s life is in danger.
“The Court concluded that neither the medical consultation nor litigation options, relied on by the Irish government, constituted effective and accessible procedures which allowed (her) to establish her right to a lawful abortion in Ireland,” it said a statement on the ruling. Here is a court press release and the full text of the judgment.
Ireland’s Health Minister Mary Harney said the government would have to introduce a law clarifying when abortion is legal in Ireland. Currently, a woman can have a termination if she has cervical cancer, an ectopic pregnancy or high blood pressure. “Clearly we have to legislate there is no doubt about that,” she told national broadcaster RTE. “I think the essence of the judgment is that we have constitutional provisons and we need to give legal effect to them.”
The court rejected appeals by two other women, both Irish, who also had travelled to Britain in 2005 for abortions. One was an unemployed, former alcoholic who was suffering from depression, living in poverty and trying to recover custody of four children from foster care when she got pregnant. The other did not want to become a single parent and feared an extra-uterine pregnancy.
Julie Kay, lead legal counsel for the plaintiffs, called the verdict “monumental” and said the European human rights court had recognised that Ireland’s courts had “turned a blind eye” to the problems women had gaining access to abortion services.
SPECIAL REPORT – In Irish schools, Catholic Church remains master
Roisin Hyde was five when she was hastily baptised a few days before she started primary school. Hyde’s parents were agnostic but because non-Catholics in Ireland had few other places to learn how to read and write, the family latched onto the only option they knew.
Thirty-five years on and Hyde, an architect in Dublin, is struggling over where to educate her own two-year-old son. It’s a dilemma faced by parents the world over. But in Ireland, where the Catholic Church runs more than nine in ten primary schools and half of all high schools, it’s a question that too often has just one answer.
“I would say that a lot of my friends, the only time they have been inside a church is to get their kids christened so they could go to the local school,” Hyde, 40, says. “I just feel so hypocritical doing it, going along for one day and then not attending.”
The reverence with which the Irish hold the Catholic Church had begun to fade even before the abuse scandals of recent years. As the economy boomed in the 1990s and 2000s, churches emptied. The abuse revelations have further undermined the Church’s authority and fractured trust, alienating committed believers as senior clergy have remained in their posts. Parents, politicians, and even church leaders have begun to call for a rollback of clerical power. Why should our children have to follow a creed just to get an education, many ask.
Despite these changing attitudes, the Catholic Church retains far more power in Ireland than in almost any other country in Europe. And nowhere is the Irish Church so deeply woven into the fabric of daily life than in education. The number of nuns and priests teaching may be down compared to a few decades ago, but the Church controls so many schools and writes so many of the rules its influence remains pervasive. In Ireland, “if it’s a state school, it’s Catholic. If it’s private, it’s usually Catholic,” Hyde says.
This lengthy special report on the continuing influence of the Catholic Church in Irish education was written by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Padraic Halpin and Andras Gergely in our Dublin bureau. Read the full report here.
Pope and Irish Catholic Church to hold summit on child abuse by clergy
Ireland’s top Roman Catholic leaders will hold talks with Pope Benedict this week to formulate the Vatican’s response to an Irish government report on a 30-year cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope and top officials would meet Cardinal Sean Brady, head of the Irish Bishops Conference, and Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, on Friday.
The meeting was called to discuss and evaluate “the painful situation of the Church in Ireland” following the publication last month of the Murphy Commission Report. The rank of the participants — who will also include the Vatican ambassador to Dublin and top Vatican doctrinal officials — effectively makes it a rare summit about the problem of sexual abuse of children in the Irish Church.
There was no indication from the Vatican statement about what it could do to respond to the report, which said the Church’s prominence in Irish life was one of the reasons why abuses by a minority of priests were allowed to go unchecked.
One priest admitted abusing more than 100 children. Another said he had abused children every two weeks for over 25 years.
In abuse by Irish priests, a little “mental reservation”
It was a ride and I was hitchhiking around Ireland and the driver of a tiny Morris Minor who’d stopped was a priest, so what could be wrong?
This was the 1970s when I was fresh out of an American college, bumming around Europe on almost no money. But it was the Ireland of my ancestors and they had no money either, so we were all in this together.
A little too much so, I discovered shortly after getting into the front passenger seat when the priest — and he was wearing his clerical collar, so there could be no doubt — put his hand on my knee.
Suddenly, if I’d been headed to Galway, which I think I was, I decided getting off at the next little village was just grand, and so slipped out of the only awkward experience I’d had hitching around a half dozen European countries.
This was years before the world — but especially Ireland — learned all too well that the Catholic clergy of Ireland had a penchant for preying on young men, and especially young boys much younger than I was at the time, and because they were so young, much less able to defend themselves — in fact, totally defenseless.
Last week, a second report was published in the massive Irish investigation into sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the Dublin archdiocese and the cover up surrounding their predations. In the spring, the commission headed by High Court judge Sean Ryan released a 2,600-page dossier detailing the abuses inflicted on children in Catholic care run by the religious orders.
I have read with great sadness the large number of abuse victims. However, there is no listing of the names of the offenders. I believe that it is important that their names be listed so that people who do come in contact with them, can be protected today. Is there a listing of names of the Catholic priests, nuns and brothers in Ireland who have been the aggressors?
Let’s protect the innocent before they become victims.
Ireland braces for another Catholic clergy sex abuse report
A damning report on sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests in Dublin is due out later this week, only six months after another report on abuse in industrial and reformatory schools across the country accused priests and nuns of flogging, starving and, in some cases, raping children in their care.
“It will not be easy reading,” Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said of this new report back in May when the uproar over the first report prompted so many calls to counseling services for abuse victims that the advice centre had to close temporarily because it couldn’t handle all the inquiries.
The Sunday Independent newspaper, which broke the news, said the report will accuse the four archbishops who preceded Martin of covering up the abuse “to preserve the power and aura of the Church and to avoid giving scandal to their congregations.”
Today, the daily Irish Independent said the diocese’s compensation bill for victims of child abuse is set to double to more than 20 million euros after publication of the report, now expected on Thursday. It is due to be presented to the Irish cabinet today.
“Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has prepared both clergy and public for what we are going to hear. This is a major break with the old tradition of secrecy, which played a major part in getting us into this mess,” wrote the Jesuit blogger Fergus O’Donoghue, editor of Studies: an Irish Quarterly Review. “Our bishops, however, seem to have an air of “business as usual”. This makes them look exactly like our bankers! They must realise that everything has changed and that diocesan and national synods in Ireland are decades overdue. We must be assured that secrecy, particularly in the appointment of bishops, has been abandoned and that Irish Catholicism is moving into a new era of openness and collaboration, even if it is about thirty years too late.”
Here’s a selection of the headlines from the Irish papers:
http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger/loyola.jpgF rom “Churches ad hoc: a divine comedy”
“The information was there” – Abp. Martin on Irish abuse report
Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has shown a refreshing frankness in talking about the widespread abuse of children in Catholic-run schools and orphanages documented in the Ryan report last week. In an op-ed page piece for the Irish Times today, he described himself as shocked but not totally surprised and recalled hearing about the abuse from victims up to 40 years ago. He refers to reporting by “a few courageous and isolated journalists like Michael Viney,” whose series on abuse appeared in the Irish Times in 1966.
“The stories they told then were not radically different from what the Ryan report presents, albeit in a systemic and objective way which reveals the horror in its integrity,” he wrote. “Anyone who had contact with ex-residents of Irish industrial schools at that time knew that what those schools were offering was, to put it mildly, poor-quality childcare by the standards of the time. The information was there.”
The official Church reaction in Ireland has been shame and apologies all around, starting with Cardinal Sean Brady. It included apologies from the Christian Brothers, a teaching order with a reputation for stern discipline and abuse charges that won a lawsuit to bar the report from naming abusers. These were certainly appropriate. What was missing, though, was the admission that the problem was well known, even if all the details were not. There was even a film made about one of these schools, The Magdelene Sisters, that won the Golden Lion at the 2002 Biennale Venice Film Festival.
Irish novelist John Banville tackled this in an op-ed piece for the New York Times on Friday:
Everyone knew. When the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse issued its report this week, after nine years of investigation, the Irish collectively threw up their hands in horror, asking that question we have heard so often, from so many parts of the world, throughout the past century: How could it happen?
Surely the systematic cruelty visited upon hundreds of thousands of children incarcerated in state institutions in this country from 1914 to 2000, the period covered by the inquiry, but particularly from 1930 until 1990, would have been prevented if enough right-thinking people had been aware of what was going on? Well, no. Because everyone knew…
Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.
We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today.
Irish Jesuit blogger Fergus O’Donoghue disputes Banville’s description of Ireland as a “closed state … ruled… by an all-powerful Catholic Church.” That was not factually the case, of course, but the Catholic Church certainly did enjoy great influence for much of that period. And many lay people accepted the Church’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to issues like this.
The devil is being kept very busy by the Catholic church. We have a pope in Rome who covered up the child sex abuse for his predecessor and still the sheeple flock to see him! Buggers belief!
Irish counselors swamped after Catholic Church abuse report
DUBLIN – Victims of sexual abuse and neglect in Catholic-run schools and orphanages in Ireland swamped counseling services on Thursday after the publication of the harrowing findings of a nine-year investigation.
“We’ve had 30 times as many calls as usual and our phone lines are always quite busy,” said Bernadette Fahy of the Aislinn Center, an organization set up by an abuse victim. “We have had to close the center because we haven’t been able to cope with the amount of people coming in.
“It’s extraordinary the number of people who are contacting services for the first time.”
Read the follow-up story from our Dublin bureau here.
It will be interesting to see how the Irish State will handle the ‘revelations’ of the Ryan report. I use that word lightly as it is hard to ascertain how many ‘important and influential’ people knew about the abuse and chose to stay quiet. Whilst the talk about money as reparations is welcomed to a degree, I am sure many will agree that the victims deserve at the very least an official apology and an independent inquiry in to the forgotten horrors suffered by so many and acknowledged by so few. I can’t bear to think of the amount of people who had to grow up in those sadistic environments. My thoughts are with them.
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