IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph
By Fergus Black
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
Leering chillingly into the camera lens, the face is that of perhaps the country’s best-known and most notorious of paedophile priests.
The fallout from the controversy surrounding the case of serial sexual predator Fr Brendan Smyth continues to resound almost 15 years after his death.
A member of the Norbertine Order, Smyth’s litany of abuse going back to the 1940s led to the collapse of a government and the exposure of widespread clerical child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
Born in Belfast in 1927, Smyth joined the Norbertines in 1945, but decades would pass before his hidden life as one of the most notorious Irish clerical sex abusers was to be revealed.
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