A report into decades of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in southeast Ireland concluded that former bishops, police and state agencies did far too little to stop the scandal.
The two-and a-half-year probe, led by retired Irish Supreme Court judge Frank Murphy, interviewed more than 100 alleged victims of abuse by 21 priests -- eight of whom have since died -- in the diocese of Ferns from 1966 to 2002. Allegations against five other priests were included in an appendix to the report, published on Tuesday.
Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin -- whose own archdiocese faces its own fact-finding probe into how Catholic leaders mishandled more than 100 abuse cases -- said the church accepted Murphy's findings, which he called ``horrific.''
"Many people would not have suffered abuse had the people with knowledge about it acted in a timely matter," said Martin, who appealed to anybody who had suffered such abuse to speak out if they hadn't already.
Ferns' former bishop, Brendan Comiskey, resigned in 2002 after admitting he had not done enough to prevent abuse, particularly by the Reverend Sean Fortune, who committed suicide in 1999 after being charged with 66 counts of molesting and raping teenage boys.
But Murphy's 271-page report found that both Comiskey and his predecessor as Ferns bishop from 1964 to 1983, Donal Herlihy, protected -- and even helped to promote -- other abusers within the clergy.
According to the report, the late Rev. James Grennan molested 10 girls aged 12 to 13 on the altar of one rural church in 1988, but never faced criminal punishment.
It said another priest, Martin Clancy, left money in his 1993 will to the woman he had raped, and impregnated, more than two decades before when she was just 14.
The report found that the police rarely investigated complaints of abuse properly -- and kept no records of any such cases before 1988. It also found that officials at government-appointed health boards also failed sometimes to act on reports of abuse.
In Ireland's parliament, Prime Minister Bertie Ahern called the report "a catalogue of serial abuse and gross dereliction of duty." Justice Minister Michael McDowell said the government would draft a law making it a crime to engage "in conduct that creates a substantive risk" of child abuse "or failing to take reasonable steps to alleviate such risk."
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