Bishop Bill Murphy of Kerry has described 2002 as an annus horribilis for the Catholic Church in Ireland. However, bad as 2002 may have been, the real annus horribilis for the hierarchy was in fact seven years previously, 1995. New revelations of paedophile priests emerged almost weekly. And now we discover that in the middle of all this the bishops' insurance strategy to protect their assets against victims fell apart. It is no accident that the two developments occurred simultaneously, writes Mary Raftery.
That the Catholic Church in Ireland is insured against the child sexual abuse of its priests is not surprising. Insurance has been a prominent feature of the clerical child-abuse landscape in both Britain and the US. However, what is of considerable interest is the timing. The bishops took out their first policies, with Church & General, in 1987. This date is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it is very early in the time-line of unfolding revelations of clerical child sexual abuse in Ireland - the issue of priestly paedophilia had not yet publicly surfaced here.
Secondly, the church's decision to insure itself in this way coincides directly with the first set of guidelines on child sexual abuse to be issued by the State. This was a key development in the recognition of the extent and gravity of the problem in Irish society.
The Department of Health guidelines emphasised that the sexual abuse of a child was a crime, and indicated that the local health board should be immediately notified of suspected cases. It would in turn inform the Garda. We now know the Catholic Church paid scant heed to these guidelines. What we discovered yesterday was that, instead, its primary response was to insure itself against risk. It is highly revealing that the bishops should at this early stage have been both sufficiently aware and concerned to embark on such a course.
However, this was not an awareness they conveyed to their flock. Quite the opposite. Throughout the 1990s, as the scale of clerical abuse of children began to emerge, the bishops repeatedly stated that their earlier inadequate responses had been based on a lack of knowledge of child sexual abuse generally. Dr Jim Moriarty, then an auxiliary bishop of Dublin, went so far in 1995 as to tell parishioners of Sutton, where Father Ivan Payne was ministering at the time of his exposure as a paedophile, that even Freud believed that people who claimed to have been sexually abused as children were fantasising. A number of parishioners took strong exception.
LAST October, Cardinal Desmond Connell himself repeated the line about church ignorance of child sexual abuse in his letter to Dublin parishioners, delivered in anticipation of the RTÉ Prime Time programme Cardinal Secrets. He made no reference to the fact that the hierarchy had had enough knowledge of the problem 15 years before to allow it to secure through insurance the protection of church assets against victims. He also refused to answer questions put to him by Prime Time on the current insurance status of the Dublin diocese.
It is significant this information has been obtained in the wake of the Mervyn Rundle case. In the wake of the largest settlement of its kind in the State's history, parishioners are becoming increasingly alarmed that money from the collection plate is being used to compensate victims of abusing priests.
Back in 1995 the collection plate money also became the focus of attention. As Dr Connell was emphatically stating that he had never paid out compensation for clerical abuse, it emerged that he had lent paedophile Father Ivan Payne €27,500 from diocesan funds to compensate one of his victims, Andrew Madden. In an attempt to limit the enormous damage of this apparent contradiction, the cardinal insisted the funds for this compensation had not come from the collection plate at Mass, but from some unspecified administration fund to which he personally made donations. Insurance was not mentioned.
The cardinal also stated at the time that he had no precedents to guide him in his decision to lend money for compensation. However, as we now know, there was a detailed, very specific insurance policy in place. A number of claims against various dioceses had already been quietly settled out of court. And the diocese of Limerick had also made a similar loan to a priest.
This then was the background against which Church & General in 1995 withdrew its cover to various dioceses against child abuse claims. The key question remains as to what the company discovered which led it to take such a drastic course.
What we know is that 1995 was also the year that Mervyn Rundle reported his abuse at the hands of Father Thomas Naughton to the Garda. As reported in this newspaper last week, the Dublin diocese referred Father Naughton for psychiatric treatment in 1986, but had not informed the psychiatrist of their own knowledge of the full extent of Father Naughton's abuse. Misled by Father Naughton, the psychiatrist stated that the priest did not have a serious problem, and Father Naughton was permitted by the diocese to remain in active parish work. Any insurance company discovering this would be alarmed at its exposure in the face of such clear negligence by the diocese.
That alarm may have turned to panic when the company discovered the reference made by this same psychiatrist to several other cases of paedophile priests, of which the diocese was aware, who had long histories of similar episodes. These cases have yet to come into the public domain. It is likely that we will have to await the proposed State inquiry to discover the full extent of what caused Church & General to take such fright in 1995.