Sir, – Patsy McGarry's report ("Bishop treated as 'scapegoat' in abuse report", Front Page, December 16th) on comments made by an auxiliary bishop of Dublin, Eamonn Walsh, at the funeral of Bishop Dermot O'Mahony, made for disturbing reading.
Bishop Dermot O’Mahony’s handling of complaints and suspicions of child sexual abuse was said by the Murphy report in 2009 to have been “particularly bad”, saying that he had been aware of complaints involving 13 priests.
Bishop Eamonn Walsh would now have us believe that Bishop O’Mahony was “scapegoated in a society that at the time ignored the principle of equity . . . to hear the other side”.
Surely the very fact that the government set up a commission to investigate the handling by bishops of sexual abuse by clergy and religious shows just how important listening to “the other side” was to society at the time?
For decades young people who were abused by church officials were not listened to. Some were even accused of lying. The Murphy report gave these victims a voice. Equity was established at last. For Bishop Eamonn Walsh to disparage the work of the Murphy commission by accusing it of scapegoating is to undermine the voice of the many who were sexually abused over decades and to insinuate, however obliquely, that bishops who were called to account by the commission might not in fact have anything to answer for at all. – Yours, etc,
DECLAN KELLY,
Dingle,
Co Kerry.