The Government’s new child protection guidelines will prosecute priests who refuse to break the seal of Confession, the Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter (pictured) has confirmed.

Speaking last night he said that priests who heard information about child abuse in confession would not be exempted, the Irish Independent reports. Earlier, speaking on RTE’s News at One, Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald had confirmed that priests would be required to reveal what they had heard in Confession.

“We haven’t made any exclusions or exemptions,” she said in response to a question from Sean O’Rourke as to whether the seal of Confession would be protected by the law. “Everybody’s under an obligation to report.”

But priest have said they will not break the seal of confession. Fr Sean McDonagh of the Association of Catholic Priests, which represents 800 clergymen, told the Irish Independent that he wouldn’t be willing to break the seal of confession for anyone”.

Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin Raymond Field said: “The seal of the confessional is inviolable as far as I am concerned, and that’s the end of the matter.”

The Catholic Church has always insisted it has no problem with the reporting of child physical and sexual abuse allegations to the authorities — except when the information is given during confession.

The Association of Catholic Priests said the legislation was a foolish move that could not be enforced.

Its spokesman, Fr McDonagh, recalled how a New Zealand Columban priest, Francis Douglas, was tortured to death by the Japanese during World War Two because he refused to reveal information received in confession about the Filipino guerrillas.

“He is held up to us as a model of how you deal with this extraordinary sacrament. You shouldn’t put into legislation something that cannot be enforced. “It makes a mockery of the legislation,” he said.

Fr McDonagh pointed out that confessions were held in private so that priests did not know who was in the confessional box.

Last year, leading criminal barrister Paul Anthony McDermott branded the Government plan “one of the daftest ideas to come out in recent years”.

Speaking about the proposal on RTE’s Frontline, he said that the idea of breaking the seal of confession made little sense when confession is “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, 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.”