The_Banker
Registered User
- Messages
- 342
What happened in Ireland from the 50s - 90s is happening in Africa right now.
R.T.E. reports that the Gardai are to investigate. Have we not enough crime in this country to investigate besides taking this on. The number of Gardai is dropping due to no recruitment. The age profile is increasing. I know that this is a terrible crime but reality must apply. Are the Gardai going to spend thousands of Euro tripping off to Africa to investigate this while the African countries do nothing
I agree with Bronte - this is hardly news, the Catholic Church is a haven for paedophiles, the uncovered abuses in this country are only the tip of the iceberg.
The age profile is increasing. I know that this is a terrible crime but reality must apply. Are the Gardai going to spend thousands of Euro tripping off to Africa to investigate this while the African countries do nothing
What gets me is that the Roman Catholic Church seems to be impervious to all the scandal and criticism of recent years. They haven't really changed anything and somehow continue to be as popular given the number of baptisms, communions and confirmations taking place every weekend. I don't get it.
I dont understand why some international body cant start from the top down and arrest the Pope for criminal activity, aiding and abetting known criminals, and then move on down the ranks and arrest the cardinals, bishops etc who have assisted in the coverup and on down to the child abusers themselves. Is there no international body with the power to do this?
I always wondered if a country could issue an international arrest warrent for the Pope. Im sure it could be done but I doubt if the political will is there to do it.
“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” said Stephens. “Geoffrey and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”
I dont understand why some international body cant start from the top down and arrest the Pope for criminal activity, aiding and abetting known criminals, and then move on down the ranks and arrest the cardinals, bishops etc who have assisted in the coverup and on down to the child abusers themselves. Is there no international body with the power to do this?
Trial by media puts society in the dock
By John Boland
Saturday May 28 2011
I seem to be more troubled than some readers about the now-routine practice of trial by television. Writing last week about the Prime Time Investigates probe into the taxi industry, I expressed my unease at the singling out of an African man who was double-jobbing as a Dublin bus driver and a cabbie. Was he the only person in [broken link removed] engaged in such practices, I wondered?
Accused by one emailer of being a politically correct bleeding heart, I incurred the wrath of another for appearing to condone the fact that the person in question was putting the safety of passengers at risk, which wasn't my intention at all. I merely felt that the programme's expose of a couple of individuals who have never been charged or even arrested for offences alleged by reporter [broken link removed] seemed invidiously selective.
This week's Prime Time Investigates (RTÉ1) adopted the same name-and-shame approach -- and the same tactic of cornering the offending person with a camera crew and a reporter armed with a microphone.
In this case, though, I shouldn't have felt unhappy with the techniques being employed -- after all, the subject was clerical paedophilia by Irish missionaries in [broken link removed], which should immediately forfeit any sympathy for its perpetrators.
Yet something still niggled.
Although there was no doubting the sincerity or honesty of the distressed young Africans being interviewed, none of the priests named as abusers has been convicted of any crime and most of them haven't even been charged.
That may be the grievous fault of a system that allows clerical authorities -- from the papacy down to heads of religious orders -- to cover up sexual crimes by its members, but it also allows the media to act both as police force and sentencing judge, which seems to me a troubling outcome.
As if mindful of this unsatisfactory situation and of the fact that the film's thrust mostly depended on unproven accusations, reporter Aoife Kavanagh prefaced the individual stories by mentioning "allegations" of abuse and rape, though she then proceeded to speak of them as unarguable facts. And they probably were, though is "probably" good enough when a priest who's confronted by her outside a Galway church and accused of the sexual abuse of a young Kenyan woman denies any knowledge of the woman in question or the crime with which an RTÉ reporter is charging him?
It's a vexing question. I'm well aware that the clerical crimes with which we're all now familiar might never have come to light if it weren't for the diligence and tenacity of crusading journalists, and it would take a very blinkered person not to see that if clerical sex abuse was rife in [broken link removed] it was almost certainly even more unfettered in Africa, but even those accused of paedophilia are entitled to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Or is that unsayable?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?