Where there's smoke around the Church, there's Patsy McGarry furiously rubbing two sticks together.
Why do people take an instant dislike to Patsy McGarry? It just saves time.
Patsy writing in the Irish Times about the six reports published yesterday can find so little in them to support his usual rant that he resorts to going back to the Murphy/Dublin Report and Cardinal Brady's involvement with the Brendan Smyth affair.
In Raphoe I can't see what Bishop Boyce is supposed to have done or failed to have done. In this piece he's described as interviewing local teachers about rumours about Eugene Greene (or Père Vert as we used to call him). No one would talk, no one would go to the Gardai and now they all want to blame Bishop Boyce.
The Belfast Telegraph does a great job of presenting individual facts and creating an impression on the 2+2=5 basis.
We''re told "Not a single piece of correspondence between clergy and victims or their families was among the documents handed over by the diocese to the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church (NBSCCC) review team."
Then we get "The NBSCCC said it had no “powers of compellability” which would have forced key individuals to co-operate." Now that implies that key individuals failed to co-operate. But there's no evidence of that.
Then they drop the unsubstantiated rumour "Acknowledging rumours that files had been destroyed, he said he would have been “very disappointed if that would be the case”.
So you see the picture the Telegraph has managed to convey - missing, probably destroyed files, witnesses refusing to co-operate, a powerless NBSCCC - gosh this all sounds like a Church conspiracy - maybe we need a State inquiry. And so it continues.
But wait - we need to hear from a victim. "Dr Boyce was challenged at a press conference in Letterkenny yesterday by a man abused for six years while a choir boy. John O’Donnell (55), from Falcarragh, said the abuse started when he was just nine and was perpetrated by a lay member of the choir but that he had made Church authorities aware of it."
What the Telegraph doesn't tell us is that none of this happened in the Church or in the Choir. A boy was abused by a man and neither he nor his parents reported it to the Gardai. And somehow this is the responsibility of Bishop Boyce.
There's no smoke without fire and if you can't see the smoke that's because it's well hidden.
