Pope visit amidst Irish abuse scandal
Accusations of wide-ranging abuse in Catholic institutions in Ireland, including but not limited to the sexual targeting of children by priests, date back several decades.
In a sign of the scale of the issue, 14,500 people applied for compensation through an Irish government scheme for those abused at juvenile facilities run by religious groups between 1936 and 1970.
As Pope Francis prepares to meet some victims during his weekend visit to Ireland, his first as pontiff, here are the most prominent cases to come to light: Irish Catholic Church leaders are accused of having protected hundreds of predator priests suspected of sexually abusing thousands of children over decades.
Allegations in Ireland began to emerge in the 1980s, among the first in an eventual avalanche of cases globally.
They prompted criminal cases and Irish government inquiries in the following decades.
The Church published a series of its own probes from 2008, which found sexual abuse allegations against at least 85 priests since 1975.
It put in place detailed procedures for dealing with child sexual abuse in 1996.
But the reviews by its National Board of Safeguarding Children found senior clergy had failed to report abuse by priests and misled inquiries before and after that date.
As many as 10,000 women were forced to work in “Magdalene Laundries” – penitentiary workhouses managed by the Catholic Church – over the last century. They suffered decades of physical and psychological abuse.
Ireland’s conservative society at the time ostracised “fallen women” who had become pregnant outside marriage, and made up the bulk of the laundries’ residents.
They worked for no pay while the religious orders ran them as commercial bodies.
Irish authorities released a 1,000-page report on the laundries in 2013, and both thenprime minister Enda Kenny and the Catholic congregations that ran the laundries apologised to the victims.
Thousands of pregnant women were also sent to “mother and baby” homes, accused of being punishment hostels complicit in illegal adoptions and mistreatment.
The Irish government in 2015 launched a commission to investigate 18 such homes – the last of which closed in 1996 – after revelations up to 800 infants may have died over several decades at one site run by Catholic nuns.
Historians alleged that their remains were interred in an unmarked mass grave at the home, which was managed by the Sisters of the Bon Secours, in County Galway between 1925 and 1961.