It is another scandal that the only clerical person, Dr Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, who has managed to retain some credibility for the Irish Catholic church in the wake of the endemic clerical sex abuse and its systematic cover-up by the Dublin archdiocesan hierarchy, is under a sustained attack by former auxiliary Bishop Dermot O'Mahony in an apparent coup d'eglise. Ironically, Bishop O'Mahony's response confirms the Murphy finding that the archdiocesan episcopal group in power at that time put the institution of the church and the interests of clergy above those most vulnerable children who looked to the archdiocese for protection and were failed by it. The survivors of this awful clerical sex abuse scandal are now being sidelined once again as Bishop O'Mahony and others named in the Murphy report refuse to accept a trenchant outside lay judgement on their actions and inactions; they continue to assert their own innocence while ignoring so much child innocence that was destroyed during their irresponsible tenure in the archdiocese in Dublin.

If the Catholic church has any hope of survival, it must accept its shameful role in its murky past of clerical sex abuse and not continue to bury its hard neck in the sands of time.

Brendan Butler,

45 The Moorings, Malahide,

Co Dublin