This is Gloucestershire
May 20, 2011
http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/news/Carney-labelled-serial-abusers/article-3576819-detail/article.html
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BILL Carney is one of 46 priests featured in the Murphy report, which investigated the handling of allegations of child abuse against clerics in Dublin by the Catholic Church and Irish authorities.
The investigating commission's 41-page brief on Carney said he was born in 1950 and ordained for the Archdiocese of Dublin in 1974.
The report said he had access to numerous children in residential care and regularly took groups of them on holiday and swimming. In summary, it said Carney was a serial sexual abuser of dozens of young people.
Most shockingly, however, it said that Carney admitted two counts of indecent assault in 1983 and compensation had been paid to six of his victims, but that he was soon back working, with access to children.
"He was one of the most serious serial abusers investigated by the commission," the report said. "There is some evidence suggesting that, on separate occasions, he may have acted in concert with other convicted clerical child sexual abusers.
"A number of witnesses who gave evidence to the commission, including priests of the diocese, described Bill Carney as crude and loutish. Virtually all referred to his crude language and unsavoury personal habits.
"One parent told the commission that the family had complained to the parish priest about his behaviour but the parish priest said there was nothing he could do."
The report said the Church's handling of his case was "nothing short of catastrophic".
"It was inept, self-serving and for the best part of 10 years displayed no obvious concern for the welfare of children," it said.
In 1992, the Church convicted Carney internally of child sex abuse. He later moved to Cheltenham and then to Scotland where, in 2004, he married Joan Clayton, whom he had met in Gloucestershire in the 1990s. The couple also bought a home in Northleach.
However, his wife only found out about her husband's past when the Murphy report was published and one of her sons told her.
In a Daily Mail article published in March, Joan said: "I felt physically sick. I couldn't believe what I was reading."
She and Carney had been holidaying in Lanzarote at the time, and following Joan's discovery she returned to Scotland to begin divorce proceedings and handled the sale of the couple's guesthouse in Scotland.
Meanwhile, the BBC journalist Olenka Frenkiel caught up with Carney in Lanzarote, where he lived for a year, to confront him about the Murphy report.
Reporting for Newsnight, she established that the Irish authorities knew his address but that no one had thought to warn his new wife about his past, and that he was subsequently free to "disappear beneath the radar".
Since the publication of the Murphy report, the lack of action on the part of the Irish authorities in bringing the named priests to justice has been a source of distress and confusion to the alleged victims and their families.
One of Carney's alleged victims was Paul Dwyer, who told police in 2004 he had been raped 21 years earlier.
The BBC said the police said they had received two other complaints like his and had sent the file to the Irish director of public prosecutions, but it decided not to prosecute.
Paul committed suicide two weeks later.
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