‘I had seen violence. But this shocked me on a level I had never experienced’
A retired garda recalls one of Ireland’s biggest child sex abuse scandals in a new TV documentary, writes Donal Lynch
‘IT was Eugene Greene’s own hubris, in the end, that did him in,” retired Garda Sergeant Martin Ridge recalls. “If he hadn’t gone to the guards himself, he might never have been caught. He had the arrogance and entitlement to feel he was untouchable.”
On the Saturday before Christmas 1997 Fr Greene, a priest living in the Donegal town of Annagry, rang the home of Ridge’s colleague, John Dooley, and told him he had been the victim of a blackmail attempt.
A young man had visited him the previous spring and demanded money, he said. Greene had ignored him, and heard nothing more until the following December, when the man called again, this time demanding £5,000.
Gardai gave the priest a recording device and watched the house. When the man returned he was arrested and taken to a garda station where he gave information that would change the course of the investigation and the lives of all involved.
“That bastard Greene sexually molested me,” he said. The man had been an altar boy decades before.
He had carried his dark secret for all the intervening years.
Now he said, he needed money to buy a house, and he felt Greene ought to pay.
“A straightforward blackmail case had turned into something very different,” Ridge recalls.
“It opened the whole can of worms.”
TG4’s explosive series Finne looks back at the case this Wednesday, and it brings back many memories of the investigation to Ridge.
The sensitivity of the programme makers mirrored his own sensitivity during the investigation. This subject meant a particular approach had to be taken: casual conversations, chats with locals.
Ridge was well regarded in the Annagry area.
His wife came from Donegal and having grown up in the Connemara Gaeltacht he spoke Irish as his first language.
He had also waged his own private struggles with drink — eventually seeking treatment for alcoholism in the Rutland Centre — and surmises that a certain “vulnerability” he had made it easier for those who had dealings with Greene to talk to him.
As word spread of the investigation more and more men came forward.
“I met them in an unmarked car. I remember one man ducking down when cars passed in case he would be seen,” Ridge says.
“It was so tough to listen to his story. His childhood years had effectively been stolen from him.”
Even before the investigation began Ridge had a history with Fr Greene.
“When we were on holidays (in Donegal) in 1976 he had baptised our daughter,” Ridge recalls.
“I was in a way loyal to the church. But what I was hearing from these men horrified me, as did the way the complaints and rumours were handled. It shook my faith in a way, or at least my faith in the institutions of the church.
“What really made me waken up was the night I visited a mother and she could barely talk. Her son had walked under a bus or a lorry. We discovered afterwards that he had been abused.”
Late one night during the Greene investigation a young man came knocking on Ridge’s door.
“He had his head bowed and he said to me that he had been abused too. I presumed it was Greene but when I asked the man who had interfered with him he said ‘Denis McGinley’.”
McGinley was then a teacher in the Derryconnor National School that served the parish where Greene was a priest. The teacher was said to have interfered with boys during lessons.
People hear ‘child abuse’ and maybe imagine inappropriate touching, Ridge says, but the stories he was hearing in relation to Greene and McGinley were much worse than that.
“There were boys who had to hide their blood-stained underwear on the way home from school.
“What went on in that parish wouldn’t happen in the worst brothel in the world.
“I had worked all during the Troubles, dealing with provos and robbers, I had seen violence. But this shocked me on a level I had never experienced.”
Ridge and his colleagues soon discovered that McGinley was part of a paedophile ring and had been receiving written material, relating to paedophilia, at the school.
Ridge later discovered that a third paedophile, a layman, who was friends with Fr Greene, had also operated in the area.
“Between the three of them there were 45 victims — that’s four soccer teams,” he says.
At the time, Ridge says, gardai in Donegal were preoccupied with other issues to do with accusations of corruption and there wasn’t much appetite for such a huge investigation into child abuse.
He had to buy a computer with his own money to continue the investigations. He says if they had relied on information from the church on Fr Greene’s whereabouts in the 1970s the case would never have got off the ground.
“We got his CV from the bishop’s office. It turned out not to be correct. We don’t know if it was a mistake or not.”
McGinley and Greene were eventually arrested on separate mornings.
“Greene was arrested at his family home. We drove around the back roads into the garda station.
“He more or less said ‘I’ll be truthful to ye once I speak to my solicitor’. The evidence was overwhelming against him.”
McGinley, Ridge says, admitted what he had done, but seemed to have little insight into the damage he had caused to so many lives.
“When we told him what he was accused of he said ‘is that all you’re on about?’”
Greene was eventually jailed for 12 years at Donegal Circuit Court in 2000 after pleading guilty to 41 sample charges of sexual assault against 26 children between 1965 and 1982.
Two years later, McGinley was sentenced to two years in prison.
In 2012 local people were outraged when McGinley was found to be living near a primary school in Donegal. He was later believed to have moved to Scotland.
Eugene Greene was released in 2008, and died last November in Cork. His victims were angry when they were not informed about his death.
“That was terrible,” Ridge says. “You would hope that his death would bring some kind of closure for his victims.
“He lived to a great old age, but in many ways he took the best of their lives from them.”
‘Between them there were 45 victims — that’s four soccer teams’