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Senator Mark Daly: The Cloyne report was published yesterday and I agree with Senator Heffernan’s request that the papal nuncio be asked to address the House and so afford him an opportunity to apologise to the families and victims-----

Senator Terry Leyden: Hope springs eternal.

Senator Mark Daly: I ask the Leader to make that possible and to offer the invitation because the papal nuncio and the Vatican have a lot of explaining to do to the people of Ireland.

Senator Heffernan also spoke about the victims. Forty victims gave evidence to the inquiry. I refer to a report from the Journal of Interpersonal Violence which carried out a substantial study of child abusers who are not incarcerated.

The study interviewed many abusers who had not been found by the authorities, who came forward under a confidentiality agreement. It found that there are 150 victims for every child abuser. This can be multiplied by the Cloyne cases and by the cases in other dioceses and it means thousands of victims, of people who are suffering, according to this report. We discussed this issue in the House a few weeks ago.

The Catholic Church is not even helping its own structures to carry out an audit on the number of reports of priests who had allegations made against them. The church does not even have that much respect for the victims that it would assist in trying to calculate the number of people needing to be helped.

The saddest statistic of all is that only one person has been prosecuted in Cloyne. There are no consequences for these priests who abuse and they, of course, have an effect on the church itself. The sad aspect is that within the church many people knew what was happening and failed to act. The new legislation proposes that any person who knows anything about what has happened in the past should come forward.