Senator defends comments made to journalist in 2002

REACTION:SENATOR DAVID Norris has defended comments made in an interview with journalist Helen Lucy Burke some nine years ago.

Speaking in Waterford, where he visited a jobs fair, Senator Norris reacted to suggestions that he appeared to downplay the offence of a Christian Brother “who puts his hand into a boy’s pocket”.

In the tape played on RTÉ yesterday, Senator Norris can be heard saying: “There is a whole spectrum in my opinion. The teacher [or] the Christian Brother who puts his hand into a boy’s pocket during a history lesson, that’s at one end of the spectrum. But then there’s a person who will attack children of either sex, rape them, brutalise them and then murder them, that’s quite different.

“The way things are presented here it’s almost as though they were all exactly the same and I don’t think they are.”

Mr Norris said yesterday that he had “never condoned” sexual abuse of any kind and “made it quite clear I thought it was utterly wrong”.

“But you have to accept there is a spectrum, and putting a hand inside a child’s pocket is deeply disgusting behaviour and wrong.”

However, while such behaviour could be “very damaging” to a young person, it is of “a different order and magnitude to the rape and murder of an infant”.

“And I think every person in Ireland would understand that,” added Mr Norris. “That’s all I said; I never condoned it,” he said.

“Nobody would say that somebody who shoplifted in Arnotts in Dublin would be of the same degree of magnitude in terms of crime where somebody actually raped and murdered somebody.

“That’s all I was saying – it’s absolutely wrong.”

He said that there “is absolutely nothing new” in the tape.

“It’s all exactly the same matter and it has been dealt with,” said Mr Norris.

He said that “even on Joe Duffy [you] heard the tape being switched on and switched off”.

“Now I want to move beyond that because I think three times is enough to discuss it.”

Mr Norris wished to thank Waterford City Council for being among the local authorities that voted for him, thus enabling him to run as a presidential candidate.