The Political Speech of the Year

Enda Kenny, Taoiseach, delivered an astonishing speech to the Dail yesterday during which he lambasted the Vatican in ways unprecedented in the history of the Irish Republic. It was, indeed, a republican speech of the best sort during which the Taoiseach asserted  – reasserted would, alas, be too innacurate a way of putting it – the primacy of the state over canon law. At long last a senior politician, responding in this instance to the Cloyne report into clerical child abuse in that diocese and the church’s willingness to cover that abuse up, has stood up to the habitual denial, obstructionism and duplicity of the church in these matters.

As Mr Kenny put it:

“It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order.”

“Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.