GALWAY (IRELAND)
Irish Examiner [Cork, Ireland]
July 21, 2024
By Terry Prone
A new documentary focuses on the worst of Casey: child abuse. But it also strips away the last remnants of a once-golden reputation
He was the first — and mercifully the only — populist Irish Bishop. A legend in his own lavish lunchtime, protected against naysayers by his blustering man-of-the people persona. Uniquely loved, he was, for his come-all-ye-singing accessibility. Fans told eye-rolling stories of his dangerous, liquor-infused driving: sure wasn’t he a terrible man, all the same? One of our own. Authentic.
As a teenager in Catholic Ireland, I was aware that my parents viewed Eamonn Casey as an intellectual waste of space, but aware, too, that – in common with the small number of critics at the time — they viewed him as no worse than that.
An exclusive in the Mail on Sunday establishes that he was considerably worse than that. Anne Sheridan’s lead story states: “The Vatican banned Bishop Eamonn Casey from public ministry for life after receiving multiple child sexual abuse allegations against him.” An RTÉ documentary in association with the Mail on Sunday, which airs on Monday night, investigates how the Catholic Church handled at least five child sexual abuse allegations against the former Bishop of Galway. It puts the final nail in the coffin of the once impregnable populist bishop’s reputation.
Casey shared with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump an understanding that the capacity to entertain may be the greatest defence against almost any criticism. Not that there was much criticism of Casey, back in the day. Because — weirdly — back in the day, he was seen as the embodiment of church modernity. He personified a move away from dogmatism to an easy popularity based on a generalised goodwill. He didn’t share his fellow fraud Fr Michael Cleary’s overt condemnations of men leaving the priesthood, for example. He was more given to ready sympathy and non-judgementalism.
He came to power, remember, when Ireland’s mass media was an open market for a bishop who talked like a human. Who was great craic. Good for a laugh. A man you’d be glad to have a pint with.
The first brick in his reputation was homelessness. Homelessness, then as now, was the issue of the day, this being the time of the seminal TV programme Cathy Come Home, and Casey was the expert, the go-to-guy for broadcasters and journalists addressing it.
Stolen scholarship
That this reputation was built on straw I revealed last year with the publication of my memoir, Caution to the Wind. In that book, I told how, as a freelance communications lecturer, I was in The Catholic Communications Centre at the top of Booterstown Avenue in south Dublin, when Bishop Eamon Casey visited one day, demanding tea and biscuits and eagerly greeted by the priests and sisters present. With one exception, a man named Fr Tom Savage, later to be my husband, who had quietly disappeared out of door to the grounds of the Centre. When I went out into the grounds of the Communications Centre to tell the priest of the bishop’s arrival, I was surprised by his negative response.
“I know Eamonn Casey,” he said. “I know him for what he is and he would not be happy to see me appear in front of him.”
“Why?”
“Because he stole my scholarship and passed it off as his own.”
Savage had, he told me, a graduate degree in sociology from Queens University Belfast, having been the first Roman Catholic priest to attend that university. He had done research work in London into homelessness, and because the Church powers-that-were knew about this, they referred Fr Eamonn Casey to him since, he was told, Casey was also interested in it.
Savage gave him a copy of his unpublished thesis and a few months later found himself reading about the ground breaking work on the issue done by the Kerryman. His original research had been claimed by Casey, who had no sociological background.
It was no more than a minor incident as far as Savage was concerned. But in retrospect and in the wider context established by the RTÉ/MoS documentary, it has more significance, revealing that a key element in Casey’s carefully structured public persona was false. His “scholarship” was stolen. His “accessibility”, meaning his attributed ability not to get bogged down in that scholarship, was consequentially false.
This does not mean that Casey was not compassionate to those who needed compassion. Or a good motivator of people in charities of which he was the patron. He was a great, great front man who was right for the time.
From homelessness on, until Annie Murphy announced that she had borne him a son, Eamonn Casey was a shining light in the modern Irish church, an ever-present entertaining character in (then) modern media. He created relationships so strong that even the normally detached Gay Byrne could not conceal his partisanship when interviewing Annie Murphy on The Late Late Show.
Casey’s absence from the public mind when he was “on the missions” in South America allowed the quiet growth of a belief that his was a story of a singular lapse, rather than a narrative of sustained falsehood. That, undoubtedly, was his own belief. Annie Murphy’s book recounts one instance of him weeping after sexual congress with her and saying he believed God loved him less as a result.
Child sexual abuse allegations
That was in 1992. Allegations of child sexual abuse made against Casey did not surface for more than a decade thereafter and were unknown to Murphy when she published her account of their relationship. The first of those allegations initially developed relatively little traction, because by that time Casey was seen as an old man who had “served his time” and who now suffered from a raft of physical ailments as well as dementia.
However, the Vatican, according to the Mail on Sunday, did take that and other claims against him seriously, and continued to bar him from saying mass publicly or giving media interviews, although the report says he breached Rome’s rules, continuing to dress as a priest in public and present himself as a priest in good standing. Which may have helped make the child abuse allegations less “sticky”. But Patricia Donovan, the niece who says he raped her and started to abuse her when she was only five years of age, didn’t let up, fearful that he would abuse other underage victims. As he apparently did.
Monday’s documentary focuses on the worst of Casey: child abuse. But it also strips away the last remnants of a once-golden reputation, leaving those who have continued to admire him, despite what they saw as a singular failure, bereft of support for that admiration.
Casey’s life was a continuum of lies, thefts and sex crimes.