This was seismic.
Neither complaint had
received any public attention.
Everyone in Ireland knew that Bishop
Casey had been forced to resign in 1992, after the revelation that he
had fathered a child, eighteen years previously, with his distant
American cousin, Annie Murphy.
However, in comparison with many of the
shocking revelations of child abuse and cover-up that came to light
after that, that consensual adult affair had come to seem relatively
venial.
People were also aware that the charismatic bishop had spent
several years working among the poor in Ecuador, atoning for his
transgression.
By
2016, Bishop Eamonn Casey was living in a nursing home in Co Clare,
aged 88, and was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He would die a year
later and 1600 people, including President Michael D. Higgins, would
attend his funeral in his former cathedral, where he was interred in the
crypt alongside his predecessors.
But in 2016, my source was
revealing that there might be another darker chapter to Bishop Casey’s
extraordinary life story, one which had already brought such trouble
upon the Catholic Church in Ireland.
The Vatican has now
confirmed to RTÉ, in an exceptional statement, that Bishop Casey was
removed from public ministry in 2006, following unspecified
"allegations", which, we have established, included at least two
complaints of child sexual abuse and a further "safeguarding concern".
The statement also revealed that the sanction had been "reiterated
formally" in 2007, and remained in place until Dr Casey died, on 13th
March, 2017.
And yet, that sanction and the reason for it was never publicly disclosed by the Church in Bishop Casey’s lifetime.
Eamonn
Casey, I discovered, had consistently denied all allegations against
him. He was never laicised and remained a Bishop to his dying day.
Although all the complaints of child sexual abuse were reported to, and
investigated by, An Garda Síochána, he was never charged with, nor
convicted of, any sexual crime.
I soon learned through local
sources that the allegations against Bishop Casey were more shocking
than anyone could have imagined. But I also discovered that they were
shrouded in secrecy. A Limerick woman, who initiated a complaint in
2014, did not wish to speak to me, I was told. That is still her
position and is unlikely to change. She signed a confidentiality
agreement after being awarded a settlement of more than €100,000 by the
Diocese of Limerick, in 2017. Her complaint related to alleged events in
the 1960s, when the then Father Casey was a curate at St John’s
Cathedral and a chaplain to St Joseph’s Reformatory School and the
Magdalene Laundry run by the Good Shepherd Sisters, where hundreds of
women and girls were incarcerated.
My
enquiries as to the whereabouts of the other accuser, who had taken a
case against Bishop Casey in the High Court in 2001, hit a dead end,
until two years later, when a third woman contacted me, after I had
joined the Irish Mail on Sunday in Dublin.
Her name was
Patricia Donovan. She is Bishop Casey’s niece and last Monday night,
viewers finally heard her story for the first time on camera. It is a
story she had waited more than 50 years to share.
After the first piece I wrote for the Limerick Leader,
in 2016, Patricia, who was living in the UK, read the story online. She
claims this was when she learned for the first time that she was not
alone in accusing Bishop Eamonn Casey of child sexual abuse.
Taken
aback by my report, Patricia Donovan picked up the phone to Tommy
Dalton, a solicitor in Limerick, who had acted on behalf of the 2014
complainant. Patricia offered to help in any way possible with that
case, sharing her story with Mr Dalton for the first time. But it was
another two years before she contacted me.
By that time, I thought my investigation was going nowhere, until an email from her arrived out of the blue.
I
was aware that she was the niece of Bishop Casey and that she had made a
complaint of child sexual abuse against him in 2005, reporting it to
authorities in the UK - first of all to the Diocese of Arundel and
Brighton in England, where Dr Casey was then working, and then to the UK
police, and later to An Garda Siochána and her native diocese of
Limerick.
I spent many hours on the phone talking to Patricia,
specifically about the abuse she alleged she had suffered at Eamonn
Casey’s hands. She told me the abuse began when she was five years old,
in 1967, and continued for at least another 10 years.
I travelled
to the UK to meet her. Patricia had agreed to leave copies of all her
documentation at the hotel where I was staying in advance of our first
meeting.
Tommy Dalton had helped Patricia retrieve files relating
to her complaints post-2005 from the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton,
as well as from Limerick and Galway. There, in the documentation that
Patricia had left for me, was the name of the woman who took the 2001
case.
It stated in black and white, on a file marked E.C. [Eamonn
Casey] from the Diocese of Arundel & Brighton: 'EC has informed Fr
[X] that there was another historical case dealt with by his solicitors
in Dublin. Name of alleged victim was Ellen Murphy. She made a claim
through the Residential Institutions Redress Board and was awarded
compensation.’
The
priest in question was a safeguarding officer, who, in 2005, after
Patricia’s complaint, saw to it that Dr Casey was suspended from all his
priestly duties and was requested to avoid all contact with children.
A
copy of this correspondence which had been forwarded to Mr Dalton by
Limerick Diocese had been extensively blacked out and, had it not been
for the unredacted version sent by Arundel & Brighton, Patricia
would not have discovered the existence of the 2001 complainant.
The documentary, Bishop Casey's Buried Secrets,
produced by RTÉ in association with the Irish Mail on Sunday, publicly
revealed the identity of this first accuser for the first time with the
consent of her son, Niall Murphy. He told us that his mother, the late
Ellen Murphy, was only ever motivated by the pursuit of justice, when
she brought her case. It was never about financial compensation.
Eventually, Ellen accepted a settlement of €40,000 from the Residential
Institutions Redress Board, plus a similar amount in costs, for abuse
she claimed to have suffered in a number of Catholic institutions,
including, specifically, two instances of alleged sexual abuse by a
young Father Casey, during her teenage years. As a condition of that
settlement, however, Ellen was obliged to halt her legal action and to
agree never to discuss her complaint publicly again.
From
the UK, I rang my news editor in Dublin to relay the news: we now had
knowledge of three women, two of whom had received settlements, but had,
as a result, accepted non-disclosure agreements. Ms Donovan, who had
never received compensation, now wanted to tell me the story of how the
Catholic Church had handled her allegations.
We had a long way to
go in substantiating as much as we could, not just about Patricia's
claims, but also the claims of others and, crucially, where the Church
stood in its position on Bishop Casey.
It would be many more months before the story went to print, in March 2019, on the front page of the Irish Mail on Sunday and six pages inside, with more to follow thereafter.
A day after the story appeared in the Mail,
I received an e-mail from Roger Childs, Head of Religious Programmes in
RTÉ, asking if I would be willing to discuss the content of the Mail on Sunday
article. Shortly after, I was introduced to Birthe Tonseth, who would
become the producer and director of the TV documentary. It would take
many months of rigorous investigation before we were fully satisfied
that we could bring to air a documentary that was accurate and fair to
all parties.
After what began as an anonymous tip off eight years ago, Bishop Casey’s Buried Secrets aired last Monday night, 22nd July, on RTÉ One at 9.35pm. It can be viewed on the RTÉ Player here.
But is this the end of Bishop Casey’s story and his secret life or are there yet more chapters to be written?
