This thread is only about one type of child abuse. Stay on topic.

Thanks Didimus.

You have just given me the way the RTÉ newsroom probably think about the story.

Needless to say, I disagree, but at least the story stands together, unlike their explanation for the disgraceful interview Tubridy made with Colm Keane on 20 January last.

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a) It is of no relevance to Ireland. Most countries are not covering it because it is of no relevance to them either. It is a big story in Germany.

b) sexual abuse cases are ten-a-penny. Unfortunately audiences have a particular boredom threshhold and with our own Dublin report and others they have probably decided that the audience would simply turn off his another abuse story was aired, when it had no particular relevance to Ireland, unlike say Boston where there is a big Irish community. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc eventually things drop down the news agenda because, as research shows, people get fed up of them and react with an "not another story on X" and change channel.

c) cost. Their Europe editor has moved to become Economics Correspondent. So they only have Tony Connelly and a small staff covering the entire continent. He can't cover everything everywhere so they weigh up where a story has an Irish angle, an Irish interest, or is a 'new' story. Sexual abuse stories are not new. What they sometimes do is to let a story develop and then in a week or two do a story summarising all the developments in one broadcast.

You forget that RTÉ is a tiny news organistion by international standards and has very limited resources. Its entire news budget, home and international, is less than the regional news budgets of some bigger stations. We are spoiled by choice here because we get three of the world's biggest, BBC, ITN and Sky News and RTÉ gets compared to those stations, who have national newsrooms, separate to the international stuff, with greater resources and more staff than all of RTÉ and TV3's staff in all areas combined. RTÉ News is actually regarded in broadcasting internationally as one of the best for its size in Europe. (The news output of equivalent small stations in Europe are almost non-existent and make TV3 News look like the BBC in comparison.)

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That's a fair enough post, Tommy. But, regarding (c) at least, RTÉ could have taken it more or less straight off the wires.

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Unfortunately children of all races and ethnicities experience child abuse, and no group is immune.

Home Page "Voice of the Faithful - Ireland"

Catholic Bishops that failed to prevent it need to be purged from the church.

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I have never once argued that it doesn't exist elsewhere in the worldwide Catholic Church, merely that it's a massively disproportionate problem in the Anglophone, Irish-dominated Church (which it obviously is). Which in turn suggests that there's something about our culture, or at least at the margins of our culture as existed over the last century, which has to feed into that prevalence. It is no secret that the Vatican's view is that this is a very local/sectional problem, not as big a problem for the Church as a whole. As to why it is so, I simply don't know. Don't get confused either about what I'm saying here, this may well be a specifically Irish Catholic Church issue as opposed to an Irish one in general, I'm not acquainted with the numbers of abuse cases involving clerics as the relate proportionally to abuse cases in general society (teachers, parents, whatever). It isn't an exculpation of the Church, either in Ireland or globally, particularly in relation to the cover-up, it's only an observation about the wider factors that are being (perhaps very conveniently) overlooked in attributing ALL the blame to religious/institutional factors rather than general societal ones...

I'm not absolutely sure about that, though we're clearly the worst country in Europe for the phenomenon.

My theory is that the difference can be put mostly down to the historical impunity incomparable to the rest of the developed world of the Irish religious.

It was clearly local impunity that allowed the abuse go on for so long in the Berlin college in question.

Have you got a better explanation? Or is there something in Irish genes?

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The invisible and the non-existent often look very much alike. --Julia Sweeney
Q: What's red and invisible?
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But again you come to the basic point - what in the story is there of particular interest to Irish viewers? Stories that are major in one country happen all the time, but other countries don't carry them simply because they become quite literally a "turn off" - they cause viewers to turn off or turn to a different channel. A major radio bulletin runs for seven minutes of news, a small one three minutes. So there is limited space and a limited number of stories. There are plenty of 'could have been carried' stories, that never make it because of time considerations. 98% of the work of the Oireachtas never gets covered, for example, in news bulletins, even stuff that is directly relevant to many people, because there is not room in the seven minute radio bulletin or 23 minute nine O'Clock News. 99% of Obama stories never get on. Indeed RTÉ is limiting the number of Obama stories it carries because of 'turn off' syndrome - people are basically Obamad out and ring in to complain if yet another Obama story is carried. People are also experiencing child-abuse fatigue also, so the number of child abuse stories is being toned down. Yes it isn't fair but life isn't perfect. If viewers feel that they have had too much of one story they get a fatigue and lose interest.

So what is a big story in Germany, about abuse in a famous school, in Ireland would be just another clerical child abuse story about yet another school somewhere foreign. I'd love to see the story - but then I'm a news junkie. So would you. But at some point fatigue kicks on on an issue, be it the weather, or the economy, or clerical child abuse, or Obama, and people want to have a break from it. RTÉ is part funded by advertising so if fatigue has set in, and people get fed up of a yet another story on a topic they ration it and only carry a story that has direct relevance to the viewers. And a story about more clerical child abuse in another school over in Germany has no direct relevance to Irish viewers. So viewers would turn off, the viewership would go down, and so would the advertising revenue. It is that simple.

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You may indeed be right.

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The invisible and the non-existent often look very much alike. --Julia Sweeney
Q: What's red and invisible?
A: No tomato. -- Anonymous


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It's obviously a cultural/environmental thing - my best guess is that it's the peculiar form of adaption to institutionalised Catholicism that happened in Ireland from the late 19th Century onwards - a combination of cultural attitudes towards power (be it power in the home, in the school, in the Church, whatever), particularly an abuse of power once gained, a tendency towards secrecy and, as you call it, impunity, a very repressed attitude towards sexuality, and a lack of openness. But I'm largely only guessing.