Diarmuid Martin has emerged as a rare voice of moral authority in the modern Ireland. He will deliver a major speech in New York next Wednesday on the theme 'A New Ireland, A New Church'.

Here, in an intrepid and thought-provoking interview he discusses abortion, political corruption, the health service, crime, drugs and double standards in Irish life. His personal regret, he says, is that 'time-poverty' has left "a certain emptiness" in his life.

A STATEMENT ISSUED BY THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS LAST SUNDAY STATED: 'YOU CANNOT HAVE A TRUE CHRISTIAN COMPASSION IF THE RIGHT TO LIFE OF THE UNBORN CHILD IS NOT RECOGNISED AS AN ABSOLUTE.' WAS THAT STATEMENT WRITTEN BY COMMITTEE?

The letter was written in common by the bishops of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland for the annual 'Day for Life'. It wasn't even a particularly Irish statement. This letter was presented to the Irish bishops as a text to approve, but it wasn't a product of the Irish bishops. In general, there is a very consistent message on abortion from the Catholic Church which is not occasioned by events.

There is a difference between the right to life and the situation in which a person finds themselves.

The two concepts should go together, along with a broad, comprehensive ethic for life which we should be developing. A real pro-life ethic would involve things like caring for our own mothers, looking after the elderly and addressing the culture of violence in society, and safe driving. I think there is a general concern in Europe at the growing number of abortions and that abortion is being used as a family-planning means which, in general, most people agree it shouldn't be.

I think the Church has to reiterate the principle in a clear, compassionate way. This is a message that is taught day in, day out without any reference either to public opinion or to particular legislation.

The fact that this document wasn't just the product of the Irish bishops shows that.

SHOULD POLITICIANS LEGISLATE FOR THE X CASE JUDGMENT?

I could only support legislation that defended the right of the unborn. There is a problem in that the current constitutional legislation seems not to do N1 that. My experience is that we have a situation in which all law is being interpreted and will be interpreted in a broad way. There's good and not so good in it. For example, the 1937 constitution is a much more robust document than people give it credit for. I'm not in favour of touching up constitutions lightly.

SHOULD MISS D, WHO APPLIED TO THE HIGH COURT FOR THE RIGHT TO TRAVEL TO BRITAIN FOR AN ABORTION BECAUSE HER BABY WOULD NOT SURVIVE AFTER BIRTH, BE LEGALLY OBLIGED TO CONTINUE HER PREGNANCY?

One way or the other, it's a tragedy for that girl. The basic question is: how do you make a judgment on the value of any particular life, especially in a very utilitarian society like ours? I don't know where you might end up. You begin with that case and you see, in some countries, people making judgements about the the lives of born children. Once you start compromising on a basic principle, you lose everything.

BISHOPS IN OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE THREATENED TO WITHHOLD COMMUNION FROM POLITICIANS WHO ESPOUSE LEGAL ABORTION. WOULD YOU?

I would hope that no politician would use communion as a photo op for his own position. The altar rail is not the place where that decision should be made. I know in a number of dioceses, bishops would speak to politicians and say, 'look, it would be more responsible for you in your situation not to receive communion.' I did say it to a politician and the person fully understood. It was not an Irish politician, but it was somebody who had taken a very public stand on moral issues. Then again, nobody asks me if a drug baron known to have ordered the killing of somebody should be allowed to take communion. The answer is no. Should people who are involved in exploitation and corruption? I would say the same to them.

IS PUBLIC MORALITY BEING DAMAGED BY POLITICAL AMBIVALENCE ABOUT WRONGDOING?

In the Ireland of today, these things are made public by the courts and the tribunals and that's the way we should be going forward. There must be democratically founded institutions to address the loopholes and temptations that are always there in public life and we should try to ensure that those institutions are strengthened and transparent. People must have confidence in these institutions. They must be seen to work and to work in a timely manner.

If people have the idea that there always was corruption in politics and you just have to live with that, the tribunals become a sort of a theatre when somebody is caught and shown up in in public. That isn't the way we should be working. We should have regular structures. Every profession has to autoregulate itself with its own code of conduct.

There is a broad problem around the world which I call the cost of politics. Look how many millionaires are trying to become president of the United States, because you have to be a millionaire to do it. The amount of money collected is incredible.

No money is given without some sort of vested interest. All money comes with a tag. With such a huge amount of money, the risks of close connections between business interests and politics become great.

Corruption in politics isn't just about politicians putting money into their own pockets. Political parties themselves have become dinosaurs which gobble up money rather than institutions that mediate between the citizens and those who are actively involved in politics. When a political party loses that type of rootedness, it is actually a deviation. If you look at some of the political scandals in continental Europe, they were very much about the need to get money for political parties, even though those political parties are getting money already from the state. The more a political party becomes a huge giant of an operation, the more it loses contact with the people.

The economy is not run by the state. It's run by business and business has an interest in a particular type of framework. It is inevitable that politics and economics are legitimately linked, but that can go terribly wrong. In the complex world we live in, the room for things to go wrong and for money to pass becomes huge. The temptation is there and we would be very foolish not to recognise that.

There are other concerns. I would be worried too about excessive ownership of the media. You can have a form of corruption in managing information.

Pope Benedict spoke about the difference between church and politics in his encyclical. He quotes St Augustine saying that a state that doesn't work for justice is a band of thieves. I think I quoted that in a homily recently and I believe the Taoiseach was there, but it wasn't directed at him.

In Ireland, we are coming to a stage where we need one of those quantitative leaps in politics that we've had at different times in history. We need a politics of idealism. We need to get people to enter into politics with strong ideas, who are prepared to take the risk of transmitting those ideals into the possible. Prosperity has been good for Ireland but the danger is that people become complacent and put their trust in that prosperity.

We have big challenges with the ageing population, for instance. I'd be worried that, having seen the huge mistakes we made in institutions for children in the past, we may end up putting our older people into parking houses.

Rather than just reacting to crisis, we should be having an ongoing debate about how we are going to construct an economy, a society and a community. The hospital situation is not moving forward as quickly as it should be. In such a modern era, to think that hospitals are places where people get sick, that says something about society.

AS THE CHAIRMAN OF OUR LADY'S HOSPITAL FOR SICK CHILDREN, CRUMLIN, ARE YOU CONCERNED ABOUT THE PROPOSED NEW NATIONAL CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL?

I think that the launching of the new children's hospital was a public-relations exercise which has flown in the face of those who did it, because everything was decided within days. Anybody who made any criticism was (accused of having) a vested interest and sour grapes. And here we are now. Nobody seems to know where we are.

I do believe that a large mistake was made, not just on the public relations level but in not adequately speaking with those actually doing the work at the time. I think the consultation process was poor. Everybody wants the best type of children's hospital and hopefully we'll get that, but we still don't know what we're getting.

In the interim, there are really serious problems.

Crumlin Hospital has very tight budgetary constraints. We have to fight constantly to even get money that we're promised. I don't think you can treat a children's hospital quite like any other hospital. Putting a child on a waiting list can have far more long-term consequences than for an adult.

If a child's health is damaged, that child could be seriously damaged for the rest of his or her life with consequent cost to the health service.

It was announced that the (professional) consultants would present their proposals in a very short time, but they haven't been delivered. Some of the intensive-care units in Crumlin are currently being over-utilised with the level of risk that's there and this was pointed out, not by the hospital, but by an inquiry on another occasion. It worries me. If children's lives were being endangered, the hospital would speak out. However, I would not like to see a situation that, at some stage, a child's life was in danger and people would say, 'you should have cried louder.' But if you ask for the money, you'll be told 'no, you've to be like everybody else.'

The board of Crumlin has written to the HSE and to the minister saying these things. I hope we won't be saying in a few years time, 'well, we could have had a hospital to be proud of, but we don't.'

As somebody who lives in this area, sometimes, when I'm going over to the southside, the longest part of my journey is getting down beyond the Mater Hospital. That problem of traffic has to be looked at.

EDUCATION The level of integration that has been achieved in the schools in north and west Dublin is exceptional.

At times, I get annoyed when schools are categorised as racist, when you go into those schools and see the ethnic mix. Immigrants live in certain parts of the city. You don't have immigrants in Dublin 4 but you don't have them in Drimnagh or Ballyfermot or Crumlin. The demographics of the city can be quite different. If you had a quota, say that every school in Dublin had to have 10% immigrants, you'd have to hire a bus fleet. There's a limit to what social engineering can do.

Immigrants have traditionally tended to go where they have friends, where they have support systems and where the housing is acceptable.

Everybody recognises the danger of ghettoisation, but the key is to ensure that, in those areas where there is a concentration of immigrants, all children get the highest quality of education available.

To some extent, the problem is due to lack of planning. You have large groups of people with children arriving into a newly developed area. The schools in Balbriggan have been pointing out for a long time that there was a need for something.

SHOULD THE STATE STOP PAYING TEACHERS' SALARIES IN PRIVATE SCHOOLS?

I don't think anybody has proposed that. I know of no country where you don't have a mixture of forms of education. The big problem for me is why certain fee-paying schools are doing better in results than other schools? I don't believe that having money and being intelligent are the same thing. When I was made a bishop, I was told that my brother and myself were the only two people on the street who finished secondary education. We weren't the most intelligent.

The important thing is to ensure that children get the same opportunity. What's not being addressed in the education debate is the possibility of having a concentration of children of disadvantaged or different backgrounds because other parents would say, 'I'm not going to send my children there.' They would opt for somewhere else, not necessarily for fee-paying schools. In Dublin, particularly, there's a lot of mobility. People will go to different schools. If people look at a school with a lot of diversity as a negative factor, then we're in serious trouble. That isn't the Department of Education or the Catholic Church. That's society making the decision.

I would be disappointed if, in a particular area, the majority of Roman Catholic secondary schools were fee-paying. That would be a wrong reflection of why the Church is present in education.

SHOULD A SIKH MEMBER OF THE GARDA BE ALLOWED WEAR THE TURBAN WITH HIS UNIFORM?

In Britain, they resolved it without any great tension. In France, they haven't. I think we should go for tolerance. We have an opportunity to get it right.

The phenomenon of integration is new. The numbers aren't huge. The overall climate among Irish people is one of tolerance. Most immigrants have enriched our society. On the other hand, look at our travelling people and the level of disadvantage there. The most basic one, life expectancy, is low.

I don't think anybody has been trying to play the migrant card for nasty, political reasons, but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that we're safe. We haven't worked that well with our travelling community.

SHOULD THE DAILY PRAYER IN LEINSTER HOUSE BE ABOLISHED?

Do they say a prayer in Leinster House? I didn't know that. They have chaplains in the House of Representatives and the Senate in the US. In Britain, the sovereign is a religious figure. The Angelus is the one people talk about here, but most people see the Angelus as a moment when they can reflect. Ireland has its own mixture of history. If you look at the structure of church-state relationships around Europe . . . Norway, Britain, Sweden . . . you have a number of countries with a state religion and none of those is Roman Catholic.

You can have a sort of secular puritanism which overlooks that there are bits and pieces of our heritage; some of which we like, some of which we don't like. The headscarf is a debate we haven't had yet.

I'm more tolerant of these things. I'd have more of a problem with events where you would have what you'd call high-quality religion. I'd have some worries about them, not because they're being carried out in the secular area, but because I think they might be a bit more pietistic. But I can live with that.

YOU PROPOSED A NATIONAL SUMMIT OF COMMUNITY LEADERS TO ADDRESS VIOLENT CRIME, BUT IT WAS DISMISSED BY THE TAOISEACH. WERE YOU DISMAYED?

I will continue to say this. What I would like to see is some of the communities who are addressing this question to begin to look at it. I believe it's in the interests of society.

YOU DON'T NEED POLITICIANS IN ORDER TO DO THIS?

No. I'm not too sure why the politicians are running away from the idea of getting communities involved. Gordon Brown made a statement saying some of the things I was saying; that, in the long term, the fight against crime will only be won at the level of community. I'm not criticising the gardai, who do a very good job. I've lived in Italy for long enough to see that, with the terrorist criminal and racketeering movements, the end came when you got communities saying 'we've had enough' and were brave enough to take a stand. In some cases, people were killed.

First, we have to build the community. We had a situation when areas were 'developed' . . . in inverted commas. That meant houses were built. There are no other structures for building up a community.

I haven't got a recipe for it and it isn't my job to do it, but violence is one of the things that really does shock me. People say it's not as bad as in other countries. What's going on here? Every day, there's another version. Now there's somebody in a slurry tank. There's a weakening of respect for human life, whether it's people being murdered or the firefighters. People get annoyed when you say a garda was killed or an innocent bystander, but you can't have a city where these people can go around having their wild west, and it doesn't matter to most of us as long as it doesn't happen in our street. Violence of this kind is anti-democratic in the most fundamental sense. They are saying that they can impose their behaviour and their interests on people and they have no regard for law or for morality or for people's lives.

Another dimension (of the solution) is attacking the interests of those people. The assets seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau should be given back to these communities. I don't know what's being done with the assets, but the communities were robbed of them and the communities should be given them back.

There is this other problem. Why is it in Irish society that people who use cocaine for recreational purposes don't see any link with a 19-yearold being killed? There's a strange dichotomy in society that these two realities are not being linked. People are being killed in one area of the city and the cocaine is being used in another part.

There are two different realities in our society. You get people using cocaine on Saturday night and eating organic food on Sunday.

HAVE YOU AND YOUR FELLOW BISHOPS REALLY FACED UP TO THE WAY THE HIERARCHY COVERED UP FOR PRIESTS WHO SEXUALLY ABUSED CHILDREN?

From my point of view, since I've come back, I've consistently published statistics. The last time I published them, two major newspapers didn't even mention them. It said something to me about a bishop publishing statistics no longer being as original and curious as it was.

Priests have gone through rough times. They've suffered. But the victims have suffered. When you see the suffering that's involvedf I've had people sitting just where you're sitting and you would feel very angry listening to their stories. One man was sitting there. The following day, I went to the opening of a school. The principal asked me if I would like a look around while we were waiting for the minister to arrive. He said: "Where would you like to begin?" He must have thought I was crazy when I said: "I'd like to see eight-year-olds."

This man had been raped when he was eight. I had to see an eight-year-old. It's inconceivable, when you see an eight-year-old, that somebody could have done so much harm to them. In some cases, you'd ask yourself, could it have been physically possible to have done what was done. Sometimes, you see these extraordinarily successful people who have this horrendous black hole in their lives. I hope that Irish society, through this, learns not just that there were priests who did things like this . . .and I'm not in any way defending them . . . but there is a huge problem in Irish society that we have to address.

HAS IRELAND GROWN CYNICAL?

There are great people in Ireland. There are great young people as well. There is that idealism of working for a better society. You just hope that the cynicism doesn't destroy people. This is part of where the Church should be challenging people to live up to their ideals. Young people can work very hard in becoming good doctors and good lawyers or whatever it is to develop their talent, but there's something missing . . . their place in the service to their community. Sometimes that dimension is there, but it's like a pop-up on your computer and you look at it and say 'oh, that's right' and close the window. If our society celebrates only success and wealth and possessions and celebrity, then you're going to create a very inhuman society.

Among the wealthy, the celebrities and the successful, there's a huge amount of fragility. There are days when all of us need to be carried.