IRELAND
TIME – Global Spin
By William Lee Adams | @willyleeadams | May 7, 2012
During the four decades that pedophile priest Brendan Smyth abused children, he frequently took them on driving excursions across Ireland. Brendan Boland, one of his victims, began going on those trips in the early 1970s when he was just 11 years old. On one outing, Father Smyth drove a group of children from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Cavan, Ireland, some two hours away. He checked them in to a bed and breakfast. “There was two bedrooms…one for the girls and one for Father Smyth and the two boys,” Boland remembers in the BBC documentary The Shame of the Catholic Church. Boland was one of the boys sharing a room with Smyth. “He called me over first and he abused me the way he did before. And when he was finished with me I went back to the bed and then he called the other boy over and done the same with him and I — this time I was — I was in the bed watching. Well I was listening, I didn’t want to watch.”
Smyth, Ireland’s most notorious pedophile, died of a heart attack in 1997 while serving a 12-year sentence for abusing some 20 children. But time doesn’t heal all wounds. The BBC documentary, which aired on May 1, has re-ignited the furor over Smyth’s crimes—and the church’s alleged conspiracy in covering them up. Critics—who include former victims and top Irish politicians—now want Cardinal Sean Brady, the head of Ireland’s Catholic Church, to resign. That’s because in 1975 Boland came forward about the abuse. As the documentary reveals, Boland, then 14, gave testimony to Brady, then a canon lawyer, which included the names and addresses of other children Smyth had abused. Boland was sworn to secrecy about the hearing. And Brady never reported the information to police—or to the children’s parents.
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