WHAT more attractive proposition could there be for your retirement years than to spend more than 20 years on a sunshine island?
Sun, sand, relaxation, away from the pressures of daily life – an idyllic way to spend your final years.
The additional attractive for Father Francis Paul Cullen was that he was also away from the pressures of knowing that he was wanted by the authorities here in the East Midlands.
Not for trifling matters, either – serious charges of sexual abuse of children.
Yet the astonishing fact remains that he was able to do a disappearing act in 1991, having been remanded on bail.
He was not the first to do that, of course, and he will not be the last – certainly while our prisons are overcrowded and the courts are reluctant to send people there while they await a trial date.
But what was the most bewildering event in this sorry saga came in 2000.
Cullen had been on the run – if that is the accurate phrase – for nine years.
And then somebody in the judiciary system took the utterly astonishing decision that he was no longer wanted. The warrant that was out for him was withdrawn.
How could this be? No new evidence exonerating Cullen of the charges which he faced had come forward.
Surely nobody thought that the gravity of the offences had somehow diminished with the passage of time?
That cannot be how these things work. If it were, then Stuart Hall and Jimmy Savile would have been sitting prettier with each passing year since their sordid acts.
How this decision was arrived at, above all, is the question which somebody has to answer.
We understand that Cullen spent the vast majority, if not all, of his time on Spanish territory.
We are supposed to be deriving the benefits of being in this big happy Euro family.
And isn't one of those that cooperation between the legal authorities make it much more difficult for fugitives from justice to feel secure as soon as they flee our shores?
But no.
Cullen went unmolested by the law in his quiet life on the holiday isle of Tenerife – and would no doubt be there still had new evidences of other offences in Derbyshire not come to light.
That kicked Derbyshire police into action – as opposed to the apparent inaction of their colleagues in Nottinghamshire.
With the help of the Catholic Diocese of Nottingham, which covers Derby, they were able to track him down and prepare a prosecution case.
Much of that case should have been heard in Nottingham 22 years earlier.
And Cullen's victims – who so bravely came forward with their willingness to give evidence – would have been spared all those years of anguish and resentment, while the cause of their misery was not only free, but not even being pursued.
Those victims, above all, deserve to know why this was so.
