CathNews New Zealand

Reports on sexual abuse from the seven visitation teams sent to Ireland by the Vatican last year are on course to be published this spring, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

The teams, which visited Ireland’s four Catholic archdioceses, seminaries and male and female religious congregations, all completed and sent their reports to Rome by the end of last year. The apostolic visitation was ordered after publication of the Murphy report into clerical sex abuse.

The former archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, widely regarded as the most powerful Catholic prelate in modern Irish history, stands accused of serial child sexual abuse, The Irish Times newspaper said Thursday.

Two specific complaints and a separate unspecified “concern” against an unidentified cleric were reported to the Murphy Commission, a state-sponsored investigation into the handling of clerical sexual abuse of children in the Dublin archdiocese. The newspaper reported that Archbishop McQuaid, who retired in 1972 and died a year later, was the unidentified cleric.

The commission published its main report in 2009, but it said that “due to human error” the latest allegations emerged only in a supplementary report published in July. This does not name Archbishop McQuaid, but the newspaper is adamant that the allegations of abuse contained within it refer to the archbishop. One allegation is regarding abuse of a 12-year-old boy in 1961.