ANALYSIS: Foot-dragging on the part of church authorities in contributing to redress costs for people abused in institutions run by them is reflected in those authorities’ lack of co-operation with their own internal audit of child protection practices
THE DISCLOSURE to The Irish Timeslast week that some Catholic bishops were still refusing to co-operate with the church's own audit into child protection practices in its dioceses and institutions will have come as no surprise. That their reasons for doing so centre on concerns they say they have over whether they can co-operate, under data protection legislation, just don't wash. They can co-operate, and this was made clear to them several times in 2010 alone.
Three times last year, Data Protection Commission officials met Catholic Church representatives to outline how they could co-operate with the audit of their own child protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children (NBSC), without contravening any law.
This applied also to the other duties the church has requested the board to undertake in monitoring child safeguarding practices in its dioceses and institutions.
Yet, following their summer meeting last month, the bishops issued a statement on June 16th, saying, with regard to the board monitoring role, that lack of progress therein was “due to difficulties in the implementation of civil law in relation to data protection. Data protection difficulties are real; they were not fabricated or invented to prevent progress”.
They continued: “To address the complex data protection issues that exist, bishops ask Government to take the necessary measures so that the national board can fulfil its full remit in terms of receiving and sharing information with church bodies, as it was established to do in the first place.”
But neither the Government nor legislation is preventing progress with the bishops’ own audit.
It is the bishops themselves.
Even if the bishops are suggesting, as a collective and in a roundabout way, that the Government use compellability legislation to “encourage’’ more reluctant colleagues to co-operate with their own audit, such legislation is already on the statute books.
It is there since the Commission of Investigation Act was passed in 2004. The bishops know this.
Are they, therefore, being disingenuous?
As this newspaper reported last Thursday, a spokesman for the office of the Data Protection Commissioner said that last November, legal concerns expressed by the Catholic Church regarding its co-operation with the board “were fully addressed to the satisfaction of all parties”.
That took place at a meeting attended by representatives of the bishops, the Conference of Religious of Ireland (Cori), the Irish Missionary Union, and representatives of the board.
It was pointed out then by officials at the Data Protection Commissioner’s office “that there are no obstacles” to the board “having full access to all relevant personal data for the purpose of comprehensive audits of the church bodies concerned”.
It was the third such meeting to take place last year alone.
There was another on September 17th last, when data protection officials met separately with the board and Faoiseamh, a counselling service set up by Cori, to discuss data protection issues, and yet another in February 2010.
At both those latter meetings too, church representatives were assured “that there are no obstacles” to the board “having full access to all relevant personal data for the purpose of comprehensive audits of the church bodies concerned”.
How much more assurance does the Catholic Church need before it can agree to co-operate with its own audit and the other duties its has given its own watchdog?
And, after all those meetings and all that assurance, how in heaven’s name can the bishops say, as they did in their statement of June 16th last, that “data protection difficulties are real; they were not fabricated or invented to prevent progress”?
There are other reasons why such a statement is to be doubted.
This current troublesome audit was announced by the bishops on January 23rd, 2009, at an emergency meeting they held following disclosure that child protection practices in Cloyne diocese were “inadequate and in some respects dangerous”.
That disclosure was made by the board in a report published on the Cloyne website a month previously, in December 2008.
It led to the State extending the remit of the Murphy commission to include Cloyne diocese. Its report on Cloyne may be published next week.That was the context in which the bishops commissioned the current audit by the board.
Yet, three weeks beforehand, on January 2th, 2009, a Department of Children spokesman told this newspaper that all the Catholic bishops had refused to complete a Health Service Executive child protection audit because of their data protection concerns.
Section 5 of that audit questionnaire sought from the bishops statistical information on complaints and allegations against clergy of child sexual abuse.
It also sought to discover whether these allegations had reported to the civil authorities. It sought no names or other details.
The bishops felt they could not fill in the answers for legal reasons.
The impression given by the bishops three weeks later, on January 23rd, in announcing their own audit, was, as reported in this newspaper on January 24th, 2009, “that a way may have been found around the insurmountable difficulties which had prevented them and the religious congregations heretofore from completing Section 5 of the HSE audit questionnaire”.
The impression was false.
Plus ça change . . .
PATSY MCGARRY is Religious Affairs Correspondent