Clerical Child Abuse
The Irish Experience
Abstract
This article has been adapted from the 3rd Michael Kirby Justice Oration, delivered at the College of Law & Justice, Victoria University, Melbourne on 7 March 2013.
Ireland has been overwhelmed in the past two decades by what the Catholic Church itself has called ‘a tsunami’ of revelations of clerical child abuse – physical as well as sexual – of the meticulous concealment of abuse and abusers and of a long-established, and almost universal policy of protecting the assets and reputation of the Church, in preference to exposing the abusers. Between 2006 and 2009 Judge Yvonne Murphy chaired a Commission of Inquiry into the child sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.
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