Primate of All Ireland Cardinal Sean Brady reads out a letter from the pope to worshippers at St Patrick's Cathdral Armagh, Northern Ireland. Pope Benedict XVI rebuked Irish bishops for 'grave errors of judgment' in handling clerical sex abuse. One of the first whistleblowers in the clerical abuse scandal which has shaken the Catholic Church in Ireland to its foundations can still recall the fear that stalked his wretched childhood. -- PHOTO: APDUBLIN - ONE of the first whistleblowers in the clerical abuse scandal which has shaken the Catholic Church in Ireland to its foundations can still recall the fear that stalked his wretched childhood.
Sent to a Church-run school at the age of four, Paddy Doyle was severely abused. It was not until he was 38 that he was able to open up about the horrors he had suffered.
'For saying anything at all, you would be seriously punished,' he recalls in an AFP interview, when asked why the systematic abuse meted out across the predominantly Catholic country was allowed to continue unchecked for so long.
When his mother died of cancer and his father hanged himself in front of him and his two-year-old sister, the Irish justice system in 1955 labelled him as 'not being in possession of a proper guardian'.
He was sent to the now notorious St Michael's Industrial School, at Cappoquin, County Waterford, south-east Ireland, where he was viciously assaulted and sexually abused.
'They were very serious abusers. We couldn't even dream of speaking out. You could be deprived of food, of any kind of social interaction with other children.
'So you just went with the way things were. All the children were under the age of 10, so it was very difficult.' - AFP.
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