The Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has said "it is very important we learn very deep lessons about the way we treated 'the forgotten ones' in the past."
Such lessons might be applied to how we now dealt with prisoners and how we received immigrants. "Tolerance is never achieved, it has to be fought for," he said.
In a question-and-answer session at a gathering with the Association of European Journalists in Dublin yesterday, he recalled how "shocked" he was at 20 when, in the early 1960s, he first visited Artane industrial school. "Dickensian isn't the word," he said. "It was a no-go area in society. The children were forgotten."
He knew that the Archbishop, Dr John Charles McQuaid, was "extremely concerned about the goings on in Artane", and remembered he once remarked: "there's not one woman in that place". The archbishop organised an order nun to help out there.
"He was very conscious about that institution and expressed frustration about Government Departments dealing with him" on the matter. In 1963 Dr McQuaid set up a hostel for boys leaving Artane. "There was nowhere for them to go, and there has not been one accusation about that institution. It was run in a very different way."
Dr Martin felt he wasn't in a position to discuss in detail the current controversy over the Government indemnity deal with 18 religious congregations, as he was out of the country for 25 years until last August. But he was confused by political reactions to the controversy, with differences between politicians in the same Government, even the same party, "who should have shared collective responsibility", on the issue.
He felt the entire spectrum of child sex abuse scandals would only come to resolution when everything came out. "There are no short cuts," he said. He believed that over the past five years there had been change in the Church's handling of the issue with "a policy of openness and of rapidly addressing problems".
In general, he said he would like to see a much less adversarial approach adopted where victims were concerned, and yet a non-adversarial model would depend on lawyers too in its evolution, he noted.
On the fall-out from Iraq he was worried "about the culture of political spin". It "weakens democracy", he said. The "more spun are answers, the less confidence there is right across the political spectrum".
Asked whether UN weapons inspector Mr Hans Blix had been right all along about there being no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and whether the war had actually enhanced the UN, he felt this seemed to be the case in both instances. But he recalled Mr Kofi Annan's recent address to the UN where he noted the threats to world peace was not just unilateralism, but also an inability of the Security Council to get its act together.
He was "a committed European" and thought the EU "a remarkable institution" which "can never have solid borders, at least in ideas. It must always be welcoming."
He would like to see a reference to "the value of the Christian tradition in the formation of Europe" in the EU Constitution, simply as a recognition of "the uncontestable role of Christianity in Europe".
He didn't believe there was the political will to mention God directly in the constitution. He wasn't asking for special privileges for Christianity. He didn't see Europe as a Christian continent or Islam, for instance, as any lesser in Europe. It was "a Europe of integration".
