In 2005, Justine Mccarthy Revealed How during an Interview Years Earlier, a Drunk Bishop Brendan Comiskey Issued an Astonishing Threat to Rape Her

Irish Independent
February 1, 2014

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/in-2005-justine-mccarthy-revealed-how-during-an-interview-years-earlier-a-drunk-bishop-brendan-comiskey-issued-an-astonishing-threat-to-rape-her-29969604.html

IT was 2pm. Bishop Comiskey was very drunk. He reeked of alcohol and was swaying. Then he told me, if you write a story like that I'll come up to Dublin and rape you.

For the rest of that week after the bishop threatened to rape me, he phoned me in the office every day, sometimes twice a day. His morning calls were usually softer-voiced and pathetic. By the afternoon, they had grown harsher, more rambling, less coherent and more disturbing. I could measure the progress of his intoxication on the phone each day.

The more he phoned, the more I felt he was establishing a macabre bond between us. Each time I heard his voice, I felt panicky. In one morning call, he turned the tables by implying that I was the one guilty of causing him injury, or planning it. The last time the bishop rang, he apologised. He had asked in one of his earlier calls if it was true that he had made a specific threat of violence against me and what, precisely, was that threat. Spelling out to a drunk prince of the church on the phone that he had threatened to rape me was not only surreal, it felt like the second-worst kind of enforced intimacy. Now this last time he called, he sounded exhausted and sober. He said he could not remember saying it but, "if I did, I'm sorry".

The following morning, my bland interview with Bishop Brendan Comiskey was published in the Irish Independent, depicting him, to my shame, as a compassionate and fearless rebel in the crusty conference of bishops. I never heard from him again.

Before the second week of April 1994, the information I had about the Bishop of Ferns was scant. I knew he was friendly with Charlie Haughey.

I was aware that he was regarded as a modern, quotable bishop.

I heard stories about him being carried out of a Dublin restaurant, too drunk to walk and collapsing with drink on a church altar; but I am not sure if these stories surfaced before or after my encounter with him.

About a year before I met him, I had arranged to interview the Newry-born healing nun, Sr Breege McKenna, at Clonliffe College. I remember being mildly surprised and, admittedly, somewhat flattered when, as she walked towards me that morning, her first words were: "Bishop Comiskey says you're a good journalist and I can trust you."

Last Wednesday, I read Mr Justice Murphy's report of the Ferns Inquiry. I wanted, in particular, to find out what had happened to the teenage girl who had allegedly been sexually interfered with by the bishop in her own home.