Moral Panic - Child Sexual Abuse
	Professional Misconduct - Moira Woods
	Index 2002
	Sunday Tribune (Ireland) September 01, 2002 And still the families wait for support by Martin Wall Justice minister Michael McDowell has already come under fire from civil liberties groups about alleged inconsistencies between criticisms he made about treatment of asylum-seekers in Ireland and his actions on the same issue since he came into office last June. Now other comments he made while an opposition PD deputy in 1993 have been resurrected by families who believe that they were falsely accused of abusing their children. Last year, the medical profession's governing body, the Medical Council, made a finding of professional misconduct against prominent medic and social campaigner Dr Moira Woods who headed the Sexual Assault Treatment Centre at the Rotunda Hospital in the late 1980s and who diagnosed some of these children. The families are now seeking a full statutory public inquiry into the way this unit at the Rotunda Hospital was run between 1985 and 1988. Central in the families' argument for an inquiry is a controversial memo written by a senior official in the Department of Health in 1993. This memo, which was first revealed by The Sunday Tribune in 1998, suggests that some at the top of the Department of Health accepted that it was possible that injustices had been done and that innocent people had been falsely accused of sexually abusing their children. Where McDowell comes into the picture is that, ironically, less than one month after this memo was written (although he would have had no knowledge of it at the time) he wrote to some of the parents, indicating that he was conscious of their suffering. In his letter, McDowell said that he would "support every effort to redress the balance in favour of innocent parents". Nine years on, the families are now asking the new Minister for Justice to act on his expression of support and to establish a full inquiry.