Who Knew?

Mary Kenny's superb Catholic Herald column is not yet online, but in it she asks, if sexual abuse were endemic for decades in the Irish Church, how, not least in that notoriously gossipy society, neither she nor most other people ever heard about it.

Almost everyone in the Irish Republic was educated by the Catholic Church. That is the wider context, providing the necessary senses of perspective and proportion to this story.

And if the anti-Catholic hysterics had their way, so that the age of consent were lowered to about 14, almost all the acts in question (almost all of them against boys) - in Ireland, Britain, America, Australia, wherever - would be perfectly legal.