_WORLD WATCH______________________________
____________________ IRELAND ________________

Embattled bishop resigns, I
Under fire for handling of sex-abuse cases
An embattled Irish bishop has resigned, after years of criticism for his handling of child-abuse cases.

Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns announced his resignation on Easter Monday. He said that he would travel to Rome to deliver his resignation letter personally that week.

The announcement came just before the broadcast of a television documentary on Father Sean Fortune, a priest of the Ferns diocese, who killed himself in 1999, before he was scheduled to face a criminal trial on a series of sexual-abuse charges.

Bishop Comiskey became a focal point for complaints about the Catholic bishops’ handling of sex-abuse cases during the mid-1990s. At roughly the same time he also provoked controversy by engaging in a public disagreement with Ireland’s leading prelate, Cardinal Cahal Daly, on the issue of priestly celibacy.

The controversy surrounding Bishop Comiskey reached a peak when he disappeared from his diocese late in 1995. He returned after an absence of several months, explaining that he had been in the United States for treatment of an alcohol problem.

Shortly after the bishop’s resignation, the Irish government announced that it had begun an investigation of how sex-abuse cases were handled by the Diocese of Ferns. George Birmingham, a leading Irish lawyer, has been appointed to head the investigation. He has been given three months to lay out plans for the full investigation. Birmingham said that his first moves would be to interview victims of priestly misconduct and to seek the cooperation of Church officials.

Rory O’Hanlon, RIP
Judge was adamant on Catholic principles
Former Irish High Court judge Rory O’Hanlon has died of cancer at the age of 78.

Controversy followed Mr. Justice O’Hanlon for much of his career as a lawyer and judge. The Irish-speaking father of 12 was never afraid to speak out in support of Catholic teaching on legal and moral issues.

O’Hanlon was called to the bar in 1946 after obtaining a first-class honors degree in Irish, English, and Spanish. He and his first wife, Mary Ingoldsby—a college sweetheart—had seven children. After Mary died from cancer, O’Hanlon married his second wife, Barbara Keating, also a barrister and 25 years his junior. They had five children.

O’Hanlon had a wide-ranging practice as a barrister. He was counsel for the Irish government in its complaint against the United Kingdom’s treatment of internees in Northern Ireland. O’Hanlon also represented the Attorney General in opposing the first challenge to Ireland’s laws against homosexual activity. The European Court of Human Rights eventually decided that states which were signatories to the European Convention of Human Rights could not outlaw homosexuality.

In 1992, the Irish government appointed him president of the Law Reform Commission; but he was sacked after suggesting that Ireland should pull out of the European Union if membership meant the introduction of abortion into Ireland.

When the government published legislation to allow the publication of information about foreign abortion clinics, O’Hanlon spoke out, saying: “If I remained silent . . . I would be betraying a trust God has imposed on me (as on all members of my faith), just as if I had been a judge in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and had remained silent when the Jewish Holocaust was being planned and put into effect.”

More recently, O’Hanlon criticized the Irish prime minister’s public liaison with a woman who is not his wife. “If the Church feels that scandal is being given, it owes a duty to its flock to denounce the giving of scandal, so that it will never appear to be condoning what is taking place. If low standards in high places are allowed to go unrebuked, they are likely to be taken as an example which the man in the street sees no reason why he should not follow.”

Just before his death, O’Hanlon took a stand against the Irish government’s abortion referendum, urging a ‘No’ vote on the basis that the proposals could allow the legalization of the morning-after pill. His contribution undoubtedly helped ensure the defeat of the government proposition.

When O’Hanlon retired from the bench, one newspaper columnist wrote: “Whether or not one agrees with his approach to the great moral issues of our time, his courage is beyond dispute. What a pity we don’t have many more like him.”