The
proposal by the Government to force priests to break the Seal of Confession
is “one
of the daftest ideas to come out in recent years”,
according to one of the country’s leading
barristers.

Mr Paul Anthony McDermott, an expert on criminal law said on RTE’s Frontline (35m 11s in) last night that the idea of breaking the seal of confession
made little sense when confession was “anonymous; you don’t have to give your
name, you don’t give your address, you don’t give your PPS number”.

He added: “So if that
law was passed as it is, it would almost certainly be found unconstitutional,
because the first thing a court would say to the Government is, why are you
breaking the seal of Confession for child abuse, but not murder?

“So if you’re going
to put forward a law, you have to put it forward on a rational basis.

“There’s no
suggestion in any of the reports that the confessional was the problem, and
therefore another problem the Government would have if there was a
constitutional challenge is trying to explain why it has challenged one of the
most serious principles of the Catholic faith in circumstances where no problem
has been identified.”

He added that he
didn’t understand “why the politicians who put forward the idea are now running
to suggest this is irrelevant to the debate”.

He said: “How can it
be irrelevant if you’re going to create a criminal offence tomorrow saying to
priests if you don’t pass on what you hear in the confessional, you’re a
criminal, you’re going to jail.

“So you can’t put
forward a proposal like that and then say “Oh, this is irrelevant to the
debate.”

He
concluded: “For most people this
is central to the debate and the real problem with the law is, and at some point
Ministers Shatter and Fitzgerald are going to realise this, I think it’s going
to be an interesting political experiment to see how many weeks it takes them to
realise it, people aren’t going to support this measure.”

Meanwhile, also
speaking on Frontine Justice Catherine McGuinness, and one of the first people
to advocate mandatory reporting of child abuse, as one of the authors of the
Kilkenny incest report, said that her report team never considered the issue of
the Seal “because it didn’t seem to create a problem, it was an irrelevance”.

She said that since
the Government weren’t going to mention the Seal of Confession in the
legislation, she believed that the Constitutional provision relating to the
protection of religious freedom would protect the seal.