All the Bishops’ Men: Clerical Abuse in an Irish Diocese

Finally the lid is lifted on how a group of priests in Wexford were able to abuse children over a thirty-year period. Boys and girls were molested, raped, stripped of innocence and left devastated. Inept supervision by bishops, botched police investigations, weak sentences, and a philosophy of hear no evil, see no evil, allowed priests to sexually abuse at will. Fr Sean Fortune’s suicide in 1999 set in train events in Ireland that led to the first voluntary resignation by a bishop in the Catholic Church in Western Europe, and precipitated the first State investigation of clerical abuse. The Ferns Report, which documented hundreds of allegations of abuse since 1966 against twenty-one priests of the Diocese of Ferns, sent shockwaves around the world. Eventually, a few good men said ‘enough is enough’. This is a searing indictment of the Catholic Church and the society that spawned and protected the abusers.