When Eamon Casey’s son first met his father, the then Catholic bishop
of Galway so upset the youngster that he fled from him in tears.Peter was a 'blubbering mess' when he met his father.
Peter Murphy, 38, first met Casey in the early 1990s in a law office after his mother, Annie Murphy, threatened to reveal the relationship unless the bishop acknowledged his son.
“My memory of the event is me trying to engage him and he having no interest in engaging with me,” Peter tells reporter Donal MacIntyre in a first part of a television documentary on Irish newspapers to be aired next week on TV3.
“I just freaked out. I ran out of the room and came down in the elevator and I was a blubbering mess,” he tells MacIntyre in Print and Be Damned, a new series revealing the hidden history of Irish newspapers.
MacIntyre — who cut his journalistic teeth in The Irish Press and The Sunday Tribune — reveals the great scoops that have shaped Irish newspapers.
The biggest scoop of the ’90s was when The Irish Times revealed Bishop Casey had fathered a child. Donal discovers how the story was delivered amid great risk to the paper. He also speaks to Peter, now living in Boston.
Peter, who has a physical resemblance to Casey, recalls the heartbreak he felt when he realised that his father did not want anything to do with him.
“I was an example of an end to all his hard work,” he says. He also recalls his anger at the interview his mother gave in 1993 to Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show. Byrne appeared dismissive of her and told Annie: “If your son is half as good a man as his father was, he won’t be doing too badly.”
This clearly upset her, with Annie responding: “I wasn’t too bad, myself.” It also infuriated her son. “I am an only child to a single mother. I wanted to deck him,” says Peter, still angry at the memory.
Conor O’Clery, Washington correspondent of The Irish Times from 1991 to 1996, broke the Casey story after the newspaper got a call from Arthur Pennell, an American who was living with Annie Murphy in Connecticut.
O’Clery interviewed Annie, who told him she had been Casey’s lover for 18 months in the early 1970s. When she became pregnant, he abandoned her, even calling into question the paternity of the child. During the interview she told her son, Peter, to take down his trousers and show a birth mark on his thigh. She told O’Clery: “You check with Bishop Casey. He has a similar birth mark on his thigh.”
While The Irish Times could not prove Peter’s paternity and considering the power of the Catholic Church at the time, they soon discovered sizeable sums of money had crossed the Atlantic from the bishop to Annie Murphy for the upkeep of her son and £87,000 had gone missing from diocesan funds.
When the story broke the Vatican forced Bishop Casey to resign and he was banished to South America for a decade.
“The fall from grace of Eamon Casey was the first crack in the edifice of the Church in Ireland,” says MacIntyre.
Print and Be Damned also focuses on reporters who were also campaigners. Nell McCafferty took on the Church on the moral issues of the day. She also got to the heart of the Kerry Babies story — a story as relevant now as it was almost 30 years ago.
Print and Be Damned airs at 8pm tomorrow night (Thursday) on TV3.