Greg DalyGreg Daly interviews Teresa Devlin, head of the Irish Church’s child protection board, about Ireland’s new national standards and guidelines
Last month saw the publication of the final tranche of reports from the first phase of reviews by the Irish Church’s safeguarding board, and the overall picture, according to board head Teresa Devlin, is one of steady progress.
“You really need to look at the detail of the reports to see that some orders took a while to get the culture of safeguarding embedded,” she explains, continuing, “the Church has had guidance in place since 1996 and the first set of National Board standards were in 2008, and it probably wasn’t until 2012 that some of them started to put proper standards around their practices and report sharply to the Guards and the HSE. Others of course hit the ground running much longer before that.”
Observing that “for most of them it was steady progress”, she stresses that “For all of them, obviously, they’re now reporting sharply to the Guards and to Tusla – they are now following the standards and policies.”
The modern Irish Church is a safe place for children, she maintains. “It’s not for me to talk about other bodies, but I think the Church since I think about 2008 recognised that they need to do something very quickly. They put in place the national board and the standards, and it is definitely much, much better,” she says.
While convinced that there is “a huge willingness to work positively” on child protection in the Church, she feels the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland (NBSCCCI) has definitely helped dioceses and orders bring a real focus to their child protection procedures.
“I think having to undergo a process of review by an independent body such as ourselves has brought them into sharp focus in terms of their child safeguarding, and I think that had we not been doing reviews people might have drifted on for another few years, but reviews definitely make people go back and look and check.”
At the same time she adds a note of caution, emphasising that there can be never be any room for complacency, and citing how there had been an allegation of abuse as recently as last year. That this could have happened, is, she says, “appalling”, but when asked whether we should take some encouragement from how the episode was handled, her agreement could hardly be more emphatic.
“Absolutely – starting with the child, him or herself,” she says, continuing, “He or she had the confidence to tell the parents. The parents had the confidence to go straight to the order, and the order immediately took action. Yes that is how it should happen: if you don’t want the abuse to happen, but if abuse happens, then this is the correct response.”
Explaining that everything happened in the one day with the order and gardaí being informed and the respondent being taken out of ministry, she says, “I have to say that the order themselves were completely devastated, to think that one of their own was still doing that.”
Decline
An important factor in things being handled so well and so swiftly, she adds, is the decline of a culture of deference both towards and between clergy. “From my perspective this is good that that’s gone or going – it’s still around in some places – but it’s definitely good because priests are human beings like the rest of us, and they feel and they have to be challenged,” she says.
How priests faced with accusations should be handled by their superiors and Church bodies has, of course, been something of a battleground in the Irish Church, with many priests feeling that relations between priests and bishops were damaged in the late 1990s and through the 2000s by an episcopal heavyhandedness in dealing with allegations. Indeed, concerns about a feared lack of natural justice have played no small part in the growth of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP), which earned a lot of respect in 2011 when helping Fr Kevin Reynolds vindicate his name after being defamed by RTÉ.
“But people forget,” Ms Devlin says, warning against excessive worries about risks to priests’ reputations, “they see Kevin being badly treated by the media, but they forget that you could list all the others who have brought shame on the Church, who have harmed an awful lot.”
Nonetheless, she agrees, in an important sense the ACP are correct. The process “has to be fair, it has to be just, and you can’t assume that everybody who’s accused is guilty”.
In order to help in this, she says, the board’s revised standards for orders and dioceses include a whole new section on care of respondents after complaints have been entered against them.
“The difficulty is that Church personnel will come to us, saying that these people are not convicted of anything, they aren’t found guilty,” she says, continuing, “and we are saying no, ‘we are not saying lock them up, but put safeguards up around people so there is clarity around their access to children, there is clarity around them in the ministry, and it’s safer for them and the children’.”
Religious priests are probably better cared for than diocesan clergy when accusations are made against them, she concedes.
“I’m always told and this is probably true that it’s easier for religious order priests because they still are a brother, they still have somewhere to live, they still are cared for – a diocesan priest may be cast out to the wolves,” she says, noting how she has heard of diocesan clergy from different parts of Ireland living rough in Dublin.
While it may be natural for people to lack sympathy for abusers, Ms Devlin is at pains to stress that such situations aren’t acceptable not least because of dangers to children. “You have to strike a balance between offering compassion and care and mercy – particularly in the year of mercy,” she says, “but also saying this is unacceptable, and not giving the wrong message to complainants.”
She cites the example of a complainant to whom she recently spoke who said of her alleged abuser, “It’s okay because he doesn’t have to worry about a leaky roof, he doesn’t have to worry if the tiles fall off his roof because the Church is going to pay for the house he’s staying in, nobody is paying for mine.”
Fine balance
Acknowledging that there is a fine balance to be struck, especially when dealing with clergy against whom allegations have not been proven, she says the new standard four addresses this and the need for dioceses and orders to have management plans.
“But at some stage,” she says, “once you know he is guilty, then you do have to cut the ties, you cannot continue to pay for someone and at some stage the State has to take over with pensions.
“We are still talking about those people in their 60s because most of this abuse did happen around the 70s, 80s and 90s, so we’re talking older people, but going forward there could well still be young people who could harm children in the Church,” she continues.
As part of the broader issue of care for respondents and complainants, policies need to be in place for people dealing with them, she says. “We know that walking the journey with an accused is a very stressful experience and therefore the same person may not be required to do it ad infinitum – there maybe should be a couple,” she says, continuing, “the standard on training and support looks at the support that’s needed for all of the roleholders – for the designated person, for the person who walks the journey with the accused, for the person who supports the complainant. What we say is that that person should also get counselling and training and support.”
The other new section in the standards, and one that it seems hard to believe was not clearly outlined already, is a section on care for complainants.
“It was loosely captured under the old standard on access, advice, and support,” she says, “but we are now saying: ‘no you really need a plan for the person who is coming forward, you need to be compassionate’. We will write further guidance on [care of the complainant] because it’s a bit skimpy at the moment.”
Focus
Stressing that “we need to sharpen our focus on caring for survivors”, Ms Devlin laments how the effects of abuse can be exacerbated when people are not responded to at the time with the compassion and the pastoral response that they need.
“They get angry and upset, entrenched in their views, and rightly so in my opinion, and they need a much better initial response,” she says, while reiterating that at the same time, “We need to get better at the process of natural justice when it comes to assessing the credibility of these allegations. We shouldn’t assume that every allegation is founded or unfounded – we have to go through a process of checking the information after the civil authorities have investigated their information.”
Training
On the day of being interviewed, Ms Devlin was involved in training Church officers on preliminary investigations when faced with allegations of abuse. These preliminary allegations only begin after the civil authorities have done their work, she explains.
“The process is once the Guards have completed their inquiries and Tusla have concluded their inquiries it’s back to the Church, and the preliminary investigation can begin,” she says. “It started with the allegation, and then it stopped to allow the civil authorities to do their business, and then it has to restart.”
Although the preliminary investigation is a canonical process that entails the gathering of evidence to establish whether or not an allegation reaches a semblance of truth, Ms Devlin notes that it need not be directly conducted by a canon lawyer, but can instead be conducted by a designated person with the support of a canonist. Unfortunately, as Ms Devlin describes it, these preliminary investigations have often failed the test epitomised in the saying “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
She explains: “What was happening was these situations were drifting, so complainants weren’t being met, weren’t being spoken to, or offered the support they were needed, and equally, the respondent – the accused – was drifting out of the ministry for two, three, four, ten years without any process.
“So we’re now saying you have to be fair, and you have to reach a conclusion. If there is a semblance of truth then there’s a penal trial, and all the rest of that happens according to what Rome says. If it doesn’t reach a semblance of truth then the priest must be restored to ministry and his good name restored,” she continues, concluding, “It is important because any of us accused of anything would want to see a proper process.”
Rewriting the Church’s standards is no simple task, she says, not least as the Irish Church is such a diverse network of bodies that a single blanket approach doesn’t quite work; she notes how during the last review process some orders were found not to be meeting certain standards that were irrelevant to them, owing to not working with children in general or children with disabilities, for example.
“What we’re doing at the moment is writing a new review methodology,” she says, continuing, “Half of the Church bodies no longer have any ministry with children so it doesn’t make any sense to assess them against the standards, so the new standards are colour-coded depending on your ministry with children and they’ll only be assessed against the standards which apply.”
The standards can seem somewhat cursory, but they are accompanied by a vast amount of guidance which was formally launched at the end of June. Adamant that the guidance is just that – guidance – she maintains that its role is to help orders which have “inundated” the board with requests for guidance of whistleblowing, complaints procedures, codes of behaviour, etc.
Orders and dioceses won’t be judged in future on the letter of the guidance or indeed the basic quality of their written policies. “They will be judged on how they relate to those who complain, how they respond to those that are accused,” she says, asking, “How do we create a safe environment?”
Measuring that is not easy, she says, but the board are working on creative ways of doing so. In the meantime, she says, “We want people to move away from what’s written on paper, in terms of policies and procedures, to what you’re actually doing, because you can have the best policies and procedures, but you can be the coldest fish delivering on some of these. And this is the Church we are talking about, so it has to be pastoral, it has to be caring.”
The ideal model for so much of this, she says, is Pope Francis.
“You need the people with the right skills and compassion,” she says. “I keep thinking this is the Church and we have to go above and beyond what everybody else does. We have to mimic Pope Francis – he is the best role model really. We have to believe when people come forward. We have to respond to them. All the processes happen thereafter, but he keeps on saying there is no room in the ministry for anyone who harms a child, and we have to mean that and follow through on that.”