Sir, - We are a group of missionary women who have spent our lives respectively in South Africa, Kenya, Zambia and Brazil. To state that we have been deeply offended by media coverage of the trial of Miss Nora Wall and Mr Paul McCabe is to understate the case. We are outraged. We expect probity, substantiation and fair dealing in media coverage of child sex abuse charges.
In the case under discussion, the DPP "fully and ungrudgingly accepted" that the defendants "were entitled to be presumed innocent". Why was there no apology to both defendants? Why was the judge who handed down the sentence, and who used such imprecise and intemperate language in so doing, not censured? Where were your front-page headlines declaring the innocence of Miss Wall and Mr McCabe? The series of organisational errors admitted by the DPP failed to address the main issue - a miscarriage of justice.
We are appalled by the moral bankruptcy of the country to which we have returned. We refer to Louis Power's article of October 28th (The Irish Times) in which he suggests that it is time to put child sexual abuses into perspective. He states that "a visitor from outer space might be excused for assuming that all the child sexual abuse in this country had been perpetrated by Catholic clergymen". Lamentably for the children concerned, the reality is that more than half of such abuse is carried out by family members. Let no reader of your columns believe that we make excuses for the inexcusable. Those, whoever they are, who have perpetrated sexual crimes against children most surely deserve a prison sentence.
As Mr Power indicated in his article, a ratio of four clerics per 1,000 have received custodial sentences. Religious orders have apologised for the pain and suffering caused by a small proportion of their members. They set up a helpline for those suffering trauma. Generations of home-based sisters, priests and brothers who served the people of this country well do not deserve the opprobrium by association cast on them by the media. Has there been any apology or sense of shame at the injustice done to them?
More important than that pain, however, is the climate engendered by irresponsible and unsubstantiated coverage of accusations which has, as its corollary, the undermining of the moral and ethical foundations of a society. Nor do we wish solely to castigate the media. We have waited for governmental apology to generations of Irish women who had to put their children into care because successive governments had no policy of sufficient child support to ensure that such children grew up in their own homes.
On whom may we depend for the upholding of each citizen's rights to fair and impartial information? It seems to us that Ireland has rapidly become an amoral society, where an imported notion of political correctness means that citizens are becoming wary of expressing their real, felt views on such issues as moral probity, decency and fair dealing. We believe that that decency will re-surface over the coming decades. - Yours, etc.,
Anne Coleman, Philomena Lynch, Mary M. Tyndall, Zita Cox, S.C. Brophy, Ellen Wallace, Sheelagh Morris, C. Monaghan,
Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary, Cavan.