Between 2005 and 2010, discussion of child abuse in the Republic of Ireland focused on abuse perpetrated by priests and members of religious orders. This attention is largely a consequence of three different and complex reports: (a) a 2005 report examining abuse in the Roman Catholic diocese of Ferns in County Wexford, (b) the Ryan Commission's mammoth report which, published in 2009, received coverage throughout the world, and (c) a report that was produced the same year and examined the handling of complaints of child sexual abuse by a “representative sample” of priests in the Dublin diocese during 1975 to 2004. This article seeks to furnish a brief, critical introduction to an international social work readership and concludes by focusing on two themes: the figure of the pedophile priest and the power of the Church in Irish society, and the centrality of poverty and social vulnerability in the lives of the victims of abuse.
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Paul Michael Garrett (2012) studied this question.