ANALYSIS: Foot-dragging on the part of church authorities in
contributing to redress costs for people abused in institutions run by
them is reflected in those authorities’ lack of co-operation with their
own internal audit of child protection practices
The disclosure to
The Irish Times last week that some Catholic bishops were still
refusing to co-operate with the church’s own audit into child
protection practices in its dioceses and institutions will have come as
no surprise.
That their reasons for doing so centre on concerns they say
they have over whether they can co-operate, under data protection
legislation, just don’t wash. They can co-operate, and this was made
clear to them several times in 2010 alone.
Three times last year,
Data Protection Commission officials met Catholic Church representatives
to outline how they could co-operate with the audit of their own child
protection watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children
(NBSC), without contravening any law.
This applied also to the
other duties the church has requested the board to undertake in
monitoring child safeguarding practices in its dioceses and
institutions.
Yet, following their summer meeting last month, the
bishops issued a statement on June 16th, saying, with regard to the
board monitoring role, that lack of progress therein was “due to
difficulties in the implementation of civil law in relation to data
protection. Data protection difficulties are real; they were not
fabricated or invented to prevent progress”.
They continued: “To
address the complex data protection issues that exist, bishops ask
Government to take the necessary measures so that the national board can
fulfil its full remit in terms of receiving and sharing information
with church bodies, as it was established to do in the first place.”
But neither the Government nor legislation is preventing progress with the bishops’ own audit.
It is the bishops themselves.
Even
if the bishops are suggesting, as a collective and in a roundabout way,
that the Government use compellability legislation to “encourage’’ more
reluctant colleagues to co-operate with their own audit, such
legislation is already on the statute books.
It is there since the Commission of Investigation Act was passed in 2004. The bishops know this.
Are they, therefore, being disingenuous?
As
this newspaper reported last Thursday, a spokesman for the office of
the Data Protection Commissioner said that last November, legal concerns
expressed by the Catholic Church regarding its co-operation with the
board “were fully addressed to the satisfaction of all parties”.
That
took place at a meeting attended by representatives of the bishops, the
Conference of Religious of Ireland (Cori), the Irish Missionary Union,
and representatives of the board.
It was pointed out then by
officials at the Data Protection Commissioner’s office “that there are
no obstacles” to the board “having full access to all relevant personal
data for the purpose of comprehensive audits of the church bodies
concerned”.
It was the third such meeting to take place last year alone.
There
was another on September 17th last, when data protection officials met
separately with the board and Faoiseamh, a counselling service set up by
Cori, to discuss data protection issues, and yet another in February
2010.
At both those latter meetings too, church representatives
were assured “that there are no obstacles” to the board “having full
access to all relevant personal data for the purpose of comprehensive
audits of the church bodies concerned”.
How much more assurance
does the Catholic Church need before it can agree to co-operate with its
own audit and the other duties its has given its own watchdog?
And,
after all those meetings and all that assurance, how in heaven’s name
can the bishops say, as they did in their statement of June 16th last,
that “data protection difficulties are real; they were not fabricated or
invented to prevent progress”?
There are other reasons why such a statement is to be doubted.
This
current troublesome audit was announced by the bishops on January 23rd,
2009, at an emergency meeting they held following disclosure that child
protection practices in Cloyne diocese were “inadequate and in some
respects dangerous”.
That disclosure was made by the board in a report published on the Cloyne website a month previously, in December 2008.
It
led to the State extending the remit of the Murphy commission to
include Cloyne diocese. Its report on Cloyne may be published next
week.
That was the context in which the bishops commissioned the current
audit by the board.
Yet, three weeks beforehand, on January 2th,
2009, a Department of Children spokesman told this newspaper that all
the Catholic bishops had refused to complete a Health Service Executive
child protection audit because of their data protection concerns.
Section
5 of that audit questionnaire sought from the bishops statistical
information on complaints and allegations against clergy of child sexual
abuse.
It also sought to discover whether these allegations had reported to the civil authorities.
It sought no names or other details.
The bishops felt they could not fill in the answers for legal reasons.
The
impression given by the bishops three weeks later, on January 23rd, in
announcing their own audit, was, as reported in this newspaper on
January 24th, 2009, “that a way may have been found around the
insurmountable difficulties which had prevented them and the religious
congregations heretofore from completing Section 5 of the HSE audit
questionnaire”.
The impression was false.
Plus ça change . . .