During the making of Cardinal Secrets, and of States of Fear before it, there was one thing frequently asked of me as producer of both documentaries, writes Mary Raftery
Don't we know all that already, people said, haven't we heard all the stories of child abuse before? What good will it do, endlessly dredging up the past? In the light of the enormous public response to both programmes, and also to the BBC's Suing the Pope, it is clear that we didn't even know the half of what was going on - and indeed still don't in many cases.
And yet, one could discern echoes of these same old questions in the Government's announcement this week of the terms of reference for the commission of inquiry into the handling of clerical child sexual abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese.
We don't want a "grand inquisition" into the Catholic Church, Minister for Justice Michael McDowell told us by way of explanation as to why the State's inquiry will be confined to Dublin alone. It would cost too much, he said, to extend the process around the country, and anyway, it is the future we should be focusing on rather than the past.
It is somewhat ironic that it should have been the current Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, who came closer to a fundamental truth. Promising full co-operation with the Dublin inquiry, he neatly summed up the reality: "We can only begin to fully address the issue of child abuse when we establish what happened in the past." It is important here to give credit to Michael McDowell for his handling of the issue of clerical child abuse, his exemplary clarity on the precedence of civil law over canon law, and his steadfast commitment to an inquiry (at least in Dublin). The three-year delay in formalising such an inquiry appears to have been not of his making, but rather due to Department of Finance concerns over expenditure.
It is thus all the more perplexing that he has refused to extend the inquiry process to the other 21 dioceses in the country. He is almost the last person from whom one would expect the old denial mechanisms, the questioning of the value of delving into the past.
It would be difficult to overstate the power of the denial reaction among the general public in the context of priests who abused children and bishops who concealed that abuse.
In Dublin and elsewhere, I have met many people (often devout Catholics) who have been ostracised by their communities and parishes (also devout Catholics) for revealing that their children were abused. Rather than being hailed for their courage in exposing these crimes, some continue to experience disbelief and hostility even to this day.
There remain many who choose to perceive this issue as a battleground between those wanting to destroy the Catholic Church and its faithful defenders. Allegations of anti-Catholic bias persist against those seeking the truth.
The perniciousness of the denial mechanism is that it can pervade all areas of community life. The instinct to defend the established moral authority within the land has resulted in an unwillingness to believe and defend the victims of all kinds of abuse. This has had profound implications not just for children but for a wide range of other equally vulnerable, minority groups. It is of vital importance for us as a society to expose and root out this propensity for denial and the enormous damage which it causes. It is in this context that the value of a nationwide inquiry into clerical child abuse should be seen.
We know relatively little about what has happened in dioceses other than Ferns and Dublin. There was some hope that after Suing the Pope and Cardinal Secrets others would take up the challenge and begin a thorough investigation of their own areas and their own bishops. Some excellent work was done on the extent of abuse in Donegal, and recent revelations about the Archdiocese of Tuam have been useful. But it remains a mere trickle.
We do have a handful of civil actions taken by victims of clerical abuse around the country. These, however, tend to be dealt with in what has become almost standard practice by the Catholic Church. Most are settled out of court just at the point where the victims are about to get access to church documents about abusing priests.
This pattern has resulted in dioceses all over the country successfully keeping their archives secret and their flocks in the dark. People have thus been able to escape their own local reality. It has allowed them to argue that Ferns and now Dublin were exceptions, that they were areas in which child abuse (and cover-up) was far more extensive than elsewhere.
The only effective weapon against denial is truth. And the only realistic means of establishing that truth is by way of an independent, State-run inquiry . . . Until we establish beyond all doubt the full extent throughout the entire country of Catholic Church complicity in child abuse, there will be those who continue to deny its reality and through this, to subject the victims to further cruel abuse.