Over 100 children could have been saved from paedophile priest Father Brendan Smyth had the sex abuse scandal been dealt with properly by the Catholic Church at the time, UTV was told.
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Journalist Chris Moore, who broke the Brendan Smyth child sex abuse story in a UTV documentary in 1994, believes many children were abused by the paedophile priest after allegations emerged in the 1970s.
"It's difficult to put an accurate figure on that but we do know that there were scores of people that were involved in court cases after that time period and had been abused after that. We haven't learned everything about Brendan Smyth's abuse and there may have been hundreds more because he was very active in his abuse," Mr Moore told UTV Live.
"The figures we do know are the figures of the children in the US, where for example he continued on his pastoral duties there in a church in North Dakota".
"There were seven children he abused there. There were children abused in Belfast, there is a long legacy of abuse. All of this happened in the time frame of the period when they said (the Catholic Church) that he had been dealt with in 1975".
On Sunday, Cardinal Sean Brady confirmed he was present at a 1975 meeting where two teenagers abused by Father Smyth were asked to take a vow of silence.
"The Church, the priests, the Bishops and the Archbishops... They are in some kind of bubble. They believe that Canon law is above our law - state law - and they felt it was their right to use Canon law to put a lid on this, keep it secret, to hide behind it and keep away any public scrutiny", Mr Moore explained.
"They put the priests under secrecy; anybody who heard any evidence at the tribunals were put under secrecy and the people who were making the complaints - and in this case with Cardinal Brady - they were two people who were also sworn to secrecy. They wouldn't speak outside," Chris Moore said.
The journalist also revealed many priests faced being excommunicated by the Catholic Church if they spoke out about internal investigations into child abuse claims, including Cardinal Sean Brady himself.
"If you didn't abide by the secret oath that you took then, you would have been excommunicated and that applied to everyone who was at the tribunals, to Father Brady himself".
Moore's documentary in 1994 revealed Smyth's history of serial child sex abuse and how the church admitted it had known about it and had moved him around Ireland, Britain and the United States, where he was able to continue to abuse other children.
The Father Brendan Smyth case rocked the church and the Irish Government - which collapsed in 1994 over delays in granting his extradition to Northern Ireland to face sex abuse charges.
Father Smyth was later jailed and died, aged 70, in August 1997, a month into his 12-year prison sentence.
Three months ago Cardinal Sean Brady insisted he would resign if his failure to act had allowed or meant any children were sexually abused by a paedophile priest.
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