We now know, thanks to Prime Time, that the Dublin diocese of the Catholic church appointed Father Frank Reynolds as chaplain to the National Rehabilitation Hospital even after he had to be removed from his position as parish priest of Glendalough, writes Fintan O'Toole.
He left Glendalough because of complaints about his behaviour towards children. But where did those complaints come from? They came, of course, from the children themselves. The one hopeful sign in the whole sordid saga is that the children at the local primary school, where Reynolds was chairman of the board of management, were able to articulate their concerns and to be taken seriously.
They could do so, in large measure, because of Stay Safe, a programme that was bitterly opposed by conservative lay Catholics and a number of prominent priests.
One of the myths recycled time and again by church representatives is that sexual crimes against children were simply not understood until very recently. The truth is that these crimes were indeed very well understood but the knowledge was deliberately suppressed.
While individual members of the hierarchy have a lot to answer for, an honest response to the current crisis must include a reflection on the long, deliberate campaign to promote ignorance and disbelief.
As far back as June 1930, the government of the Irish Free State established a commission to consider the reform of Irish laws on sexual offences against children. It was chaired by William Carrigan K.C. and its membership included a Jesuit priest, a Church of Ireland clergyman, and leading figures from the medical establishment. A number of Catholic priests gave evidence at the commission's hearings, as did the leading Catholic layman, Frank Duff of the Legion of Mary.
The commission reported in August 1931. It pointed to "an alarming amount of sexual crime, increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of cases of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years."
It also suggested that less than 15 per cent of these cases were brought to court, partly because of "the anxiety of parents to keep them secret in the interests of their children, the victims of such outrages, which overcame the desire to punish the offenders."
The commission underlined the result of this reluctance: that abusers could be pretty sure of getting away with it. "The frequency of assaults on young children is to some degree attributable to the impunity on which culprits may reckon."
Yet the Carrigan report was effectively suppressed. When it was circulated to the cabinet in December 1931, it was accompanied by a memo from the Department of Justice warning that it would not be wise to publish the report, for fear of giving scandal.
When Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932, and the new cabinet considered the report, the Minister for Justice, James Geoghegan, submitted a long memo attacking the commission and urging that its findings not be published.
Geoghegan's memo suggested, among other things, that the evidence of children could not be believed: "It is understood that many competent authorities have grave doubts as to the value of children's evidence. A child with a vivid imagination may actually live in his mind the situation as he invented it and will be quite unshaken by severe cross-examination."
The underlying attitudes to child abuse were made explicit in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1935, which defined the offence of "only attempted carnal knowledge" as "a minor offence fit to be tried summarily". The Carrigan Report, meanwhile, was suppressed and did not see the light of day until Finola Kennedy wrote about in the quarterly Studies two years ago.
All of this is the dim, dark days of the 1930s. But it is also the dim, dark days of the 1990s.
The attack on the Stay Safe programme, after it was introduced in 1991, was mounted by right-wing Catholic organisations such as Parents Against Stay Safe, Mothers Working At Home and the so-called Education Forum of Ireland. Their propaganda alleged that the programme would deluge rural communities with false accusations, that it "prepared children for abuse" , and that encouraging children to tell their teachers if anyone interfered with them was "a direct attack on parental responsibility."
Imagine what this was like for Deirdre McIntyre and Maria Lawlor, who developed the programme. Imagine what it was like for the hundreds of committed primary teachers, especially in small rural communities, who were being threatened and insulted.
Imagine what it was like for the teachers and parents in Glendalough, where Frank Reynolds was chairing the board of management.
There are still many primary schools that don't have the Stay Safe programme because of the hysterical campaign of the early 1990s. There are still parents who have been ostracised in local communities because they made complaints about abusive priests.
There is still a deep reservoir of wilful ignorance that will not go away unless others as well as the bishops take responsibility.
An apology from the anti-Stay Safe campaigners to the primary teachers of Ireland might be a decent start.