The real scandal at the heart of child abuse

Sworn to Silence

This is a story of survival, and as such is well worth reading. Undoubtedly Brendan Boland suffered badly at the hands of Fr Brendan Smyth, and later at the hands of the clerical bureaucrats.

But the central matter is not the cover-up by the Church in protecting its own. It is the historic fact of child abuse itself, which came, not from the Church in Ireland, even though its power structures enabled it to happen, but from Irish society.

Scandal

It has long been clear that, though it is a terrible fact, clerical child abuse is only a small part of the overall scandal. To concentrate on it is really a failure to inquire into the reason for abuse on such widespread scale in Irish society as a whole.

This book contains valuable information and insight. But to understand the matter fully, a wider scan is needed. By concentrating on the clerical scandal the media are in fact undertaking another kind of cover-up, hiding from Irish society what it does to itself. Abusers have as likely as not been themselves abused in childhood.

It is not Fr Pat in the sacristy who is the true problem, but Uncle Seán in the back bedroom.