Quite right... I can not...
However I have never been brought up in a sexual straight jacket either, or had to submit to the pressures of either group. Priest or Prisoner.
In Victorian times and earlier, sex with Child prostitutes was not only normal but preferred as it was safer. They were not considered Pedophiles. Marriage to 13 year olds was very common. In ancient Greece sex with younger men and boys was the ideal.
Pepys spent his sixpences wisely.
Time and circumstances change perceptions.
If there was no adults available to the priests, it would be a possibility that they were using the children as some sort of replacement for an adult sexual relationship, but priests are in constant contact with vulnerable men and women and it would be almost as easy for them to foster an abusive relationship with an adult as with a child.
Regarding the history of child abuse, while it is still abhorrent, most of the child prostitutes in the victorian era were between the age of 14 and 18, the victorians believed that having sex with a child would cure veneral disease, this is a notion that still haunts parts of Africa, where some people believe it will cure aids. Deflowering a child was a strong taboo in the victorian era and there were men who did pay for the ''privelage'' but these men were paedophiles, it doesn't matter when the era was or if it was accepted socially (which it wasn't) the bottom line is , if you have paraphilia and the object of your desires is a child this is paedophila.
I think there is a lack of understanding of the culture in Ireland, up until the 90's people were encouraged by their families to enter the priesthood, it was the ultimate goal of many families to have 1 son a doctor and 1 son a priest, a son that should little inclination towards the opposite sex would have been strongarmed into this, instant respectability, perhaps their families suspected they were gay or that they had an unnatural obsession with children and needed to give them the cloak of respectability, or maybe they genuinely felt their sons had a calling, either way it was the society that was forcing the men into the priesthood.