Bring The Clergy To Justice!

Please sign this petition if you think that clerical child abusers and all who covered up for them should be brought to justice for the horrific crimes that these criminals have perpetrated. The Murphy report into the rape and molestation of 320 children by 46 priests in the Dublin Archdiocese has found the Church and a former Garda Commissioner covered up abuse.

The 700 page report has just been published, it finds 4 Archbishops in Dublin did little or nothing to protect children from paedophile priests.

The Government has just published the report into the handling of clerical child sex abuse in the Dublin Diocese.

The 700 page “Murphy” report details 320 children’s allegations of rape, molestation and sexual assaults against a representative sample of 46 priests between 1975 and 2004.

The reports contents are shocking – it reveals Gardai did not investigate child rape and says the goal of the church was to cover up.

The commission finds one priest raped or molested more than 100 children while another admitted abusing children every two weeks for more than 25 years.

One of the most shocking allegations is that former Garda Commissioner Daniel Costigan was contacted by Scotland Yard in the UK in 1960 and told that the Chaplin of Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children had sent photographs of children in sexual positions to the UK to be developed.

The Commission finds that the photographs disappeared after being given to the Gardai and Commissioner Costigan didn’t launch an investigation into allegations of molestation. Instead he held a meeting with then Archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, and allowed the church to investigate alone. Archbishop McQuaid concluded no crime had been committed.

The report concludes that there was not a paedophile ring operating between Dublin priests but some of the trends of abuse between priests who knew each other or were friends was “worrying”.

The Archdiocese of Dublin under Archbishops John Charles McQuaid, Dermot Ryan, Kevin McNamara and Cardinal Desmond Connell was found to have a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude to child abuse.

The Murphy report concludes that one of the biggest tragedies of abuse it found in this investigation was that in these instances, unlike others, children were believed by their parents and some in authority but the Church and Gardai didn’t investigate.

A few months before the publication of the Murphy report, the shocking details of the endemic abuse suffered by those in institutions in Ireland were revealed in the Ryan report.

“History simply will not forgive us for pleading difficulties here. From now on our school history textbooks will have to include an account of the concerted persecution of almost 150,000 children, the beatings and rapes and unexplained deaths, the cruelty perpetrated by Catholic religious orders in the mid-20th century. German schoolbooks are legally obliged to educate their children about the horrors of the Holocaust, and we have no less a duty to ensure that the period of institutional abuse, shameful as it was, is fully recorded.

Future generations of schoolchildren will want to know what happened next - precisely how our society, when finally confronted with the truth, registered it's disgust and outrage at the treatment of those defenceless children.

If we were really serious about holding the guilty to account, we would set up a criminal tribunal to put the ringleaders on trial. It would almost certainly involve a constitutional referendum, but it wouldn't be impossible. The facts have been established by the Ryan Commission Report. We now know that thousands of children were physically and sexually assaulted, starved and enslaved over a sustained period of time.

The identities of the congregation leaders, and of the heads of institutions such as Daingean, Artane and Goldenbridge during the relevant periods, are a matter of public record. We know what they did, and who they were. Children were raped and brutalised while these identifiable people were legally and morally responsible for their care and protection. So they are guilty, either by omission or commission. There are no presumptions of innocence here - all a tribunal would need to establish, through witness testimony, is whether the relevant authority figures actively participated in the atrocities, or simply turned a blind eye to them.

The people in charge of the institutions must be put on trial as soon as possible. Otherwise history will hold us all to account.”
-- Extracts from an article by Brenda Power, published in The Sunday Times 31-5-2009.

Since the publication of the Ryan and Murphy reports, the government has done as little as possible under pressure from the victims and the public as they wait for this issue to blow over. The government, the religious and the media are talking about compensation but few are talking about bringing prosecutions. If as many people as possible sign this petition it will be evidence of the anger of the Irish and international public and our insistence that these criminals be brought to justice.

Thank you for your support.
E. Daly and L. Cassidy
clergytojustice@gmail.com