Hello and thank you for downloading this witness podcast with me Rebecca Kesby and today we go back to one of the most shocking stories of the late 20th century, the exposure of the scale of child abuse within

the Catholic Church in Ireland, and this program contains distressing material from the outset. It's the beginning of October 1994 and an addition of

counterpoint on you TV in Belfast is about to change history.

This is the story of a Catholic priest who's also a pedophile. A man who for over four decades,

brutally sexually abused children from as young as the age of six, both boys and girls.

I had my skill skirt on and he says to me, pull your skirt up, I've sort of scared and didn't want to do,

it says come over and sit my knee.

So his hand just kept going up and up my leg.

I was scared. I was crying.

And then he started putting his hands up, my knickers and hands up into my vagina.

It wasn't until after I broadcast the film I really knew the extent of the significance of it.

The taboo had been broken. that opened the floodgates.

Chris Moore is an investigative journalist in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but his programme

suffer little children was broadcast both north and south of the Irish border.

It had an immediate and lasting impact on the church, the country and on the world's understanding

of sexual crimes against children.

Within a few days of the broadcast, Chris received a phone call from a manager at the Rape Crisis

Center in Dublin.

They'd been inundated with calls.

She said the night that the program had out on the subsequent nights

they've had to employ so many extra staff because there was a whole groundswell of people

talking about abuse that had been kept inside them for tens of years.

...