SIR RONALD WATERHOUSE
The retired High Court judge chaired the £14 million North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal. In 2000 he was told of serious allegations that the Tribunal had failed to do its job properly. Whatever he felt about those allegations, he took to his grave …
IN OCTOBER 2000 Sir Ronald Waterhouse agreed to meet Paddy French, then a journalist with the Wales This Week current affairs programme at HTV in Cardiff.
French had asked for an off-the-record briefing from the retired judge but did not specify the issues he wanted to talk about.
The meeting took place at Sir Ronald’s home in the village of Walford near Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire.
Sir Ronald agreed to the discussion, as he put it later, because he wanted “to ease your labours as far as possible in a friendly fashion by providing answers to any queries that you had that could be dealt with quickly.”
But French had not come for a friendly chat — instead over the course of the three-hour meeting he delivered a detailed critique of the work of the Tribunal.
The following year French sent Sir Ronald a long letter summarising the conversation.
Sir Ronald replied the next day.
This article is based on this correspondence.
The complete article can be found at Rebecca Television
Rebecca Television covers the whole of the UK but includes a built-in bias to issues concerning Wales. It’s independent, does not accept advertising or sponsorship and depends on donations to cover its costs.
The Editor is the Irish-born journalist Paddy French. He was a current affairs producer on the ITV Wales current affairs strand Wales This Week for nearly ten years.
theneedleblog 
He was also a junior on the Moors murder case.
Waterhouse….the Dormouse of the mad hatter’s tea party that was the appeal on the Pembroke ‘ritual abuse’ appeal case in 1994 where Elias, the Counsel for the Inquiry was prosecutor, you have to see the bizarre claims he made at that time to understand where he was at. . The Pembroke trial was a constructive farce, and only held together at all through jiggerypokery of the trial judge, the Appeal a whitewash – Waterhouse was a ‘safe pair of hands’ for upholding the status quo – namely that there is not something rotten in the cjs re the staging of abuse ‘show trials’ etc. Of course he did not pursue the ‘unthinkable’ that the entire North Wales saga had been massively overhyped from the outset (as per Pembroke). No, he as with the other ‘bastions of justice’ settled for some weird nonsensical ‘ middle ground’ – rejecting the conspiracy theories but accepting the ‘broad mass’ of complaints as they presented themselves. But in fact both the North Wales and the Pembroke cases started out from a belief and promotion of ‘ring theory’ and this underlying flaw has never been addressed. The ‘Elm case’ is of course a recent example of this – but has been jettisoned by the cjs.
History will judge….