This article is from page 2 of the 2009-12-01 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 2 JPG
THE late Archbishop of Dublin, Kevin McNamara was one of the leading personalities in the Catholic Church in Ireland in his lifetime, but in death he now stands indicted as a figure who singularly “failed to 1m- plement canon law rules on dealing with clerical child sex abuse’.
The Clareman who was 38 years a priest before dying in 1987 after a serious illness has also been ex- posed as a church leader who facili- tated known child abusers such as Fr Ivan Payne and Fr William Carney to continue working as priests in the community.
“Bill Carney is a serial sexual abus- er of children, male and female. The commission is aware of complaints or suspicious of child sexual abuse against him in respect of 32 named individuals,’ the Murphy Report SEA
It adds, “He (Archbishop McNa- mara) restored priestly faculties to Fr Carney despite his having plead- ed guilty to charges of child sexual abuse in 1983 and despite the fact that there were suspicions about him in relation to numerous other chil- dren. He failed to ensure that Fr Car- ney obeyed instructions and allowed him, in effect, to flout the wishes of his superiors’.
Archbishop McNamara’s_ reputa- tion has taken another hammering
with the Murphy Report finding that one of his first acts as Archbishop of Dublin was to promote Fr Ivan Payne to a post of responsibility within the
church.
‘He promoted Fr Payne to the po- sition of Vice-Officialis of the Mar- riage Tribunal despite the previous
refusal of Archbishop Ryan to do so,’ the report says.
Subsequently in 1998, Fr Payne pleaded guilty to charges of indecent
assault on ten victims and was sen- tenced to six years’ imprisonment.
The shocking findings of the Mur- phy Report into child sex abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese published last Thursday has also revealed that Mc- Namara was one of four Archbishops of Dublin from the 1960 through to the 1980s who “failed to report his knowledge of child sex abuse to the Garda”.
“All the Archbishops and many of the auxiliary bishops in the period covered by the Commission handled child sexual abuse complaints bad- ly,’ the Murphy Report says. “Dur- ing the period under review, there were four Archbishops – Archbish- ops McQuaid, Ryan, McNamara and Connell. Not one of them reported his knowledge of child sexual abuse to the Garda.”