IRELAND
Laois Nationalist
A 29-year-old woman is seeking a paternity DNA test to find out if Father Michael Cleary is her biological father.
Felicia Irwin claims Fr Cleary’s housekeeper and secret lover, Phyllis Hamilton, is her birth mother.
The man known as “the singing priest” fathered two sons with his housekeeper Phyllis Hamilton, throughout their 26-year relationship.
The first born boy Douglas Boyd Barrett was given up for adoption, while the second, Ross Hamilton was reared by Phyllis and Fr Cleary, they lived as a family in secret.
Phyills had claimed her third pregnancy resulted from a rape by a priest who had been staying at the parochial house with her and Fr Cleary – but in an interview given in 1995 she later admitted that she didn’t know if “Fr Cleary or ‘the other man’ was responsible.
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