Significant Television: Journalism, Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church in Ireland

Abstract

MOST CITIZENS OF THE Republic of Ireland describe themselves in their census returns as Roman Catholic, although attendances at church have been declining (O'Mahony, :).Irish Catholics long endured religious discrimination and persecution under British Protestant rule.Partly for that reason, the Irish media tended to treat the Catholic Church very respectfully or deferentially after the foundation of the independent Irish Free State in  (Fuller, ; Inglis, ; Kenny, ).However, by the closing decade of the twentieth century, Ireland had passed through a period of rapid and remarkable change (Brown, ; Ferriter, ; Kenny, ).Economic, social and cultural factors made it more likely than before that Irish broadcasters would produce programmes critical of clergy and bishops.Irish Catholics still make a major contribution to social and educational services in Ireland and abroad.However, during the twentieth century, some priests and members of religious orders physically and/or sexually abused children.They were not unique in this respect.Most child abuse is committed by lay people, including some parents, close relatives, teachers and sports coaches, and not all is committed by Catholics. First Public Awareness of Irish Child Sexual AbuseIrish television viewers frequently tune into the BBC and other British services and many were able to see, for example, a special edition of Childwatch presented by Esther Rantzen in .This BBC programme marked the launch of the UK charity Childline and is said to have been '… a significant intervention into the issue of child abuse, particularly in relation to sexual abuse … Its timing in late  served both to raise public awareness but also to disturb many previously untouched sensitivities' (Parton, : ).Child sex abuse by priests was being reported extensively in the United States, from the mid-s, raising questions about the possibility of its occurrence elsewhere (Rossetti, :).According to an official report, commissioned by the Irish state (Ferns Inquiry: ), It is generally accepted that awareness of the nature of child sexual abuse in Ireland coincided with high profile cases such as the Kilkenny Incest Investigation in  and The West of Ireland Farmer case in .These cases demonstrated that child sexual abuse was a crime perpetrated by apparently upright and decent members of the community.However, both of these cases concerned sexual abuse within the family.Evidence of systematic child abuse at Irish institutions first came to public attention not in the SIGNIFICANT TELEVISION: Journalism, Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church in IrelandColum

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.