As apologies go Garda Síochána Commissioner’s Fachtna Murphy was not very persuasive.

“This is an important chronicle of events within the Dublin Archdiocese over a forty year period. It makes for difficult and disturbing reading, detailing as it does many instances of sexual abuse and failure on the part of both Church and State authorities to protect victims.

The Commission has found that in some cases, because of acts or omissions, individuals who sought assistance did not always receive the level of response or protection which any citizen in trouble is entitled to expect from An Garda Síochána. I am deeply sorry that this occurred.”

The fact that it took second billing to a press release on ‘Operation Bicycle Lights’ did not make it any more convincing.

It’s not often that even my most distant relatives make the news but Archbishop John Charles Mc Quaid was popping up everywhere today because of his part in protecting child abusers from prosecution as described in the Irish Government’s report. When priests were reported to the Garda they referred the matter back to him and he shuffled them onto another parish where they could continue abusing. This prompted me to see if John Cooney’s biography could throw any light on the relationship between the Archbishop and the Garda. It did and Commissioner Murphy seems to stand in a long lone of Irish cops unwilling to be too blunt about the Catholic Church.

In 1952 the Yugoslav football team arrived in Ireland to play. The League of the Kingship of Christ shared Mc Quaid’s view that the footballers were representatives of “a tyrannous regime of persecution” and that anyone attending would be committing a mortal sin. That’s the really bad type. Mc Quaid persuaded the Government to oblige the President to reverse his decision to attend the match. The Army band which had already begun practising the Yugoslav anthem suddenly beat a tactical retreat. The Irish team’s coach was a cop and he was not involved in the preparation for the game due to clerical pressure. Radio Eireann did not broadcast the game.

 Cooney sums up the affair by saying of Mc Quaid “his contact with the Taoiseach, the Department of Justice and the Garda Síochána ensured that the control he exercised over “official” Ireland was almost total: no minister of state or municipal representative attended the match.”

On the plus side over 21 000 people defied the clerical ban and IRA veteran Dan Breen attended the match so that he could “fire his last shot for Ireland” with a protest against theocratic rule.

That episode is the only significant reference to the police in the most authoritative biography of Irish Catholicism’s dominant figure in the twentieth century. This is partly because all the most incriminating documents were stored in the vaults of the Archbishop’s residence and most police officers would not have committed their inquiries to paper if they were investigating abuse claims against a priest. Yet trivial as it is the football match story conveys something of the inability of the Irish state to confront the power of the Catholic Church and the craven deference of public officials to the organisation. The state was as much to blame for the abuse as the Church.