Archbishop Martin said yesterday that he did not attend Bishop Casey’s funeral because of the deceased’s affair with Annie Murphy and unofficial reports he’d received that the Kerryman had also had affairs with other women.
‘I heard that there were other allegations against Eamonn Casey, but not concerning child abuse. I had heard that there were problems concerning his relations with other women,’ Dr Martin said. ‘I didn’t go to the funeral but not on the basis I’d heard any specific allegation against him.
‘I found it hard they could give such a celebratory thing for him in light of [his affair with] Annie Murphy,’ he added.
‘And he knew about Fr Michael Cleary [and Cleary’s affair].’ He said he had been told unofficially while Bishop Casey was still alive he was not allowed to engage in public ministry. But he had never been advised the restriction was ‘because of any allegations of child sexual abuse’, he explained.
The 79-year-old Archbishop noted the parallels between the Catholic Church’s failure to restrict Bishop Casey from 2007 onwards and its failure to remove US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from public ministry from 2012 onwards.
McCarrick was restricted after the Vatican found him guilty of sexually abusing several children and adults, including seminarians.
The lapses that occurred in America triggered a top-level Vatican study which found in 2020 that the then-Papal Nuncio in Washington DC, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano had failed to act on the evidence which showed McCarrick was flouting Pope Francis’s restrictions.
It also found that there was no evidence that Dr Vigano had informed the Vatican about an additional written allegation he had received stating that McCarrick had abused a child some years earlier.
Archbishop Martin observed: ‘The restrictions on Cardinal McCarrick were not made public. He violated them repeatedly. There were pictures [published] of him smiling with the Nuncio’.
Meanwhile, a source within the Catholic church told the MoS that bishops were not told of Eamonn Casey’s predatory behaviour at any point in their quarterly meetings of the Bishops Conferences.‘It never happened,’ he said.
‘The hierarchy acted like it wasn’t happening.’
The Irish Mail on Sunday has previously documented its quest to find accurate information from dioceses in Ireland and the UK about the allegations held on file against Eamonn Casey.
For years, the Galway Diocese insisted that it had only one allegation on its files against Bishop Casey.
Two years after their first statement, they said they had in fact five allegations of child sexual abuse on file – as well as other complaints made by adult women who had relationships with Bishop Casey.
The Kerry Diocese also initially refused to disclose any information about any complaint made against Bishop Casey when asked by the MoS in March 2019.