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Cardinal Desmond Connell has in the Dublin courts that pitted him against his successor, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. The cardinal was trying to stop the clerical abuse investigation gaining access to six thousand files from his period of tenure, which Archbishop Martin has proposed to make available to the investigation. This was, to my knowledge, a legal challange unprecedented in the history of the Irish Catholic Church. It was always going to be a lose-lose situation for the cardinal and the church. If he won the case, the public woul believe he was hiding documents useful to the investigation. If he lost the case, he would look like he was trying to thwart the investigation. Perhaps a senior Vatican official has had a word in the cardinal's ear.