Safeguarding work is ‘credit’ to Irish Church

Ireland’s experience in tackling clerical child abuse is being acknowledged around the world, according to the CEO of the National Board for the Safeguarding of Children in the Catholic Church.

Teresa Devlin told The Irish Catholic how the board was asked earlier this year to address Australia’s royal commission on institutional abuse and explain the impact it has made in terms of child safeguarding in Ireland.

“They really wanted to understand how the Church had come to the position it was in in Ireland, the journey of the Church,” she said. “Which I have to say has been a sad start but I think that we’re still working away along that journey but the evidence in, and you’ll have seen the annual report, the statistics are way down.”

Abuse survivors attending the commission’s hearing congratulated her on efforts made to turn things around in the Irish Church, she said, with one survivor’s evidence being “a credit to the work that is being done across the Irish Church”.

Reality

The Australian commissioners had praised the board’s work, Mrs Devlin was told in June’s Anglophone Conference, where clergy and child protection officers from across the English speaking world shared their experiences with other countries, including ones where the reality of child sexual abuse is rarely acknowledged.

During the conference several African delegates said the problem didn’t exist in their countries, Mrs Devlin said.

“Those who have been there before are saying ‘yes you do have this problem you just don’t see that you have this problem’,” she said, suggesting two ways that the Irish Church can improve child protection worldwide: it can attend conferences like the Anglophone one to try to influence good practice abroad, and it can influence the international policies of Irish orders that have missionary members.

Praising the “army of volunteers” who ensure Ireland’s child protection safeguards work, Mrs Devlin stressed that the board has not made itself redundant, highlighting how more work is needed on how to tackle such issues as online child abuse. “I keep saying in our annual reports, as we have this year, that there is no room for complacency,” she said.