A leading Presbyterian safeguarding expert said the collapse of child-protection systems in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland could be on the scale of the Catholic Church’s past scandals.

Ian Elliott, an internationally renowned safeguarding specialist who has worked extensively in the Catholic Church, said that some in the church dismissed comparisons with Catholic scandals.

Despite this, he warned: "I would feel strongly that there is nothing to say that we're [PCI's] not dealing with something similar here." 

He added the scale of failures required “a statutory public inquiry”.

The comments came in an interview with BBC Spotlight after a review found “serious and significant failings” in the PCI’s central safeguarding structures from 2009 to 2022, covering part of former moderator Rev Trevor Gribben’s time as lead administrator.

The PSNI has now launched a criminal investigation, as reported by Premier Christian News previously.

Former PCI safeguarding head Jackie Montgomery Devlin, who served from 2019, also told the programme she arrived to find almost no records.

She said critics asked why she had not contacted police, but added: “There were no records, so I didn’t know if anything had happened. If I had gone to the police… their response might have been, ‘What can we do… when there’s nothing there?’”

She said one of her first actions was to assemble an expert panel, including Elliott, who later resigned after receiving no answers from Gribben about historic case files.