When Woods and the two crones were doing the devil’s work, the latter insisted that the A.G. not be informed!!

Nobody in the Govt. had any say in the matter and therein lies the problem.

With regard to the Constitution question about who can bring a case: in the case of State v King 1978, the Supreme Court decided not to judge on the question of whether the Constitution applied to citizens of another country and reserved their judgement for a more appropriate case.

Note: I am unaware of subsequent case law that redefined this.

By projection, it appears to me at least, that if this were applied in the matter of the Redress Board, then it would need a person who was “Involved with this Board, had a claim against the Church for abuse etc. would then be the most appropriate person to take a test case under the Constitution.

In the matter of the Redress Board and action against clerics who were believed to have committed abuse, then this matter has been “aired” in the public domain and the media.

My understanding is that the Minister for Justice could and should have instructed the appropriate authorities to investigate and report; as these matters would be of grave public concern.

Maybe it is simply a case that the Minister (and his staff) have managed NOT to have heard this information.

Maybe it would be good to have a question raised in Dail Eireann underlining the above issues of public concern, their sources and bringing these to the attention of the Minister and his department for their reaction and possibly even action.

One area that has always been of interest to me is the actual chain of events around the Church / State agreement.

To me, it seems to have been presented, and I do not mean to sound trite; as a set of events that seemingly were initiated by an outgoing Minister and presented to the Government effectively as a “fait accompli” an accomplished fact; an action which is completed before those affected by it are in a position to query or reverse it.

If my understanding of the run up to these events is indeed correct, then the time and activity preceding this is worthy of investigation.

Did the then Minister suddenly decide?

Did he do this in isolation of the other members of that said Government and indeed his Civil servants, who then also decided not to share this and its potential impact with their counterparts in other departments?

How much information on this time and sequence of events is already or can be put into the public domain under Freedom of information?

And importantly, I believe was, “what was the spirit” held by the Minister and Government in negotiating and reaching this agreement seemingly laden with largesse to in effect many departments of one organisation, the Catholic Church.

This area, time and the sequence of events, to my understanding, has never been sufficiently understood; so never fully investigated and seemingly terminated by the fact that the responsible Minister apparently and conveniently retired the day after.

It does not seem to rest well with myself who as part of an action ensured that the agreement and other supportive documentation was made available on the web to survivors and others with interest in this.

My reasoning is that this apparently Ministerial initiative was better known to the Department and assumably other arms of the government than they pretend.

My reasons for saying this are simple. I loaded the document onto the ‘net at approximately 8.10 in the evening and it was checked as being active and available externally at around the same time.

The following morning at approximately 9.20 every telephone line that I had and followed by ISDN lines went “dead”. It was only after the threat to issue on Eircom, a State side Mandamus that same morning in the High Court that services were resumed.

Strange that a government and its agents whose most notable qualities would never appear, at least to many in the public, to be speed of action were indeed able to appear guilty of both when the circumstances apparently suit.

The other question of course is how did they know? How did they notice a couple of documents appearing on the web, then to be able to act, through back channels to influence an Irish company into a speedy but decisive action, (effectively one and a half hours of their official working day!)

Only the threat of a forced appearance in a public forum and the potential associated publicity seems to have installed them with the necessary energy to reverse their action with appropriate speed.

The government and Irish authorities have indeed questions to answer in their dealings and their actions in this Church / State affair.

The 2 main opposition parties to this government have to date been seemingly unable to unseat their political rivals.

Apart from the consideration of a test constitutional case, has anyone or indeed any of the “representative” groups approached the opposition parties to seek the appropriate responses for guarantees from them should they reach a position of government and power, to open the other Pandora’s boxes that surround this and indeed, how can we know, other areas that have and may continue to actively influence public policy.

All I can say is that you, the survivors, have been victims under what we have assumed to be our understanding of what democratic government is. The only truth to this that has, to my mind been established so far is that apart from democracy being hard work, we also have to consider that underlining this system was and is a cruel, but pragmatic realisation that full blown democracy has been seen to be counter productive to development, the popularly assumed priority of any society, or government.

If anyone has acces to the Irish Law Times this is the information:

The Congregational Indemnity Agreement : an Unconstitutional Endowment of Religion? / Eoin Daly

Irish law times, ISSN 1649-4164
vol. 27, issue 8, page 111-116

Barry Clifford e mail: bgclifford@iol.ie
This was already posted up in December on Paddy;s site. Be aware, be very aware

Is that why the Catholic Church still has control over 90% of our National Schools?

Let’s face it folks, the Irish Government, like all their predecessors, cede the control of our Schools and our Hospitals to the Catholic Church. Its still “Business as Usual” as far as the Irish socio-political system goes and that’s because the vast majority of the Irish people are symbiotically-attached to their Roman Catholic masters in government. It took 800 years to convert us, after all…