Saturday November 08 2008

Shocking new figures show that 400 children have been identified as possible victims of sex abuse by priests in the Dublin Archdiocese -- proportionately even higher then the catalogue of horrors found by a Government investigation into the Diocese of Ferns.

And settlement claims paid to victims suspected of being abused by 152 priests over the last 68 years has soared to more than €12m.

"It is most likely that this is not a final figure," Archbishop Diarmuid Martin conceded yesterday, when he disclosed the revised figures showing the horrendous scale of clerical paedophilia in the archdiocese since 1940.

The Ferns probe identified more then 100 allegations of child sex abuse between 1962 and 2002 against 21 priests.