Over the last 25 years, revelations of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy have given rise to one of the greatest institutional scandals of modern history. Sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has been reported across all five continents, though the countries that have received most attention are located in the ‘First World’, including the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and more recently, Germany, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Malta, Italy and Switzerland (Keenan, 2012: 3). The media played a key role in raising awareness of clerical child abuse in these countries by bringing this hitherto taboo subject to a mass audience and by campaigning for public inquiries into the church's handling of allegations. Moreover, in decrying the ‘evils’ of child abuse, the media acted as society's moral arbitrator, a role previously occupied by the church itself.

In this chapter we explore the role of the media in exposing clerical child abuse in Ireland, focusing in particular on how a series of television documentaries paved the way for two major inquiries (Ferns and Dublin) and on the media's subsequent coverage of the inquiry reports. We look at how the controversy surrounding the clerical child abuse inquiries embodied key features of an ‘institutional scandal’: social norms were transgressed leading to moral outrage; the actions of individuals brought the Catholic Church as a whole into disrepute; and allegations of institutional ‘cover-ups’ proved to be as damaging as the acts they sought to conceal. The process of ‘scandal inflation’, whereby the media keeps a story alive by finding new ‘angles’ and ‘unveiling even more bizarre or aberrant behaviours’ (Butler and Drakeford, 2003) is also considered in relation to media coverage of the inquiries.