I think you might be assigning too much to "canon law" than is actually the case.  Canon law is really just the bylaws of the church as an organization.  It isn't a separate, parallel set of rules that prescribe different sanctions and benefits than civil law would do for the same offenses or actions. There is no means in canon law, to my knowledge, to sanction an individual for murder, bribery, theft, etc., other than to fire them from their present job.  So I'm not sure that there is as much of a contradiction as you say.

Rather, it appears that the case in Ireland is that people are much more voluntarily deferential to Church officials than they are in most of the rest of the Catholic world. And policies tend to follow the biases of the people, even in non-democracies. Formally ejecting the church from the state's institutions did little to diminish the authority of the church in Latin America, for example. Why? Because people remained culturally Catholic and retained the same biases and values that are the principle causal factors in institutions and policies.

I think we also need to ask at some point whether sexual abuse is really as heinous a crime, objectively, as we are initially inclined to think of it.  A lot of your argument here seems predicated upon a presumption that sexual abuse is different from other alleged offenses, like terrorism is presumed to be as well, and that exceptions should be made in the normal administration of justice to be able or intervene sooner, or to not allow the normal possibility of forgiveness to occur without the intervention of the state that happens with most other non-capital offenses.  Perhaps that is the case with sexual crimes, but I'm skeptical of it, even in the case of sexual abuse of children.