Casey: from boys’ club to the horror chamber
After the shocking revelations about Bishop Eamon Casey fathering a son with Annie Murphy in 1992, he disappeared and I was assigned to track him down. The world wide web of organised Catholicism had spirted him away and following tip-offs I made several trips to exotic hideaways before he was eventually found in Mexico.
I visited Annie Murphy at her home in Connecticut then met her in a hotel in New York and she was gracious and charming. I later discovered she had an apartment near my local pub, Humphrey’s in Ranelagh, and she was a regular while involved with Casey.
The intimate disclosures gave Bishop Casey a reputation of a prelate as a party animal – frenetic drinking sessions then consensual heterosexual sex before resuming his life in the Catholic hierarchy.
One man I knew in Galway had even loaned cash to Casey when the Bishop was taking money from Church funds to pay child support for Peter, his son with Annie Murphy.
Yet for all his shortcomings Casey was widely regarded as a generous and charitable man – and his failings often seen as evidence of vulnerable humanity.
His clerical delinquency was ‘philandering’ – almost a no-lights-on-yourbike misdemeanour compared the grave crime of paedophilia when the scandals of clerical child abuse were emerging through the 1990s.
And like many others, I was profoundly shocked by the initial disclosures in this newspaper about the accusations of Bishop Casey raping his niece for ten years from the age of five.
But I was sickened last week when this newspaper revealed that four women had made official claims and a further two women had contacted the Church in Britain to share similar stories but declined to legally pursue their complaints.
The serial allegations of child abuse also explains the Church’s separating him from parishioners. Most dutiful Catholics – and other
citizens without religion – believed that Casey’s sins were orthodox man-and-woman affairs. And that for a priest to have an affair with a woman is a human failing in a different league to the evil incarnate in the sexual abuse of children.
If I, like so many others, was wrong about Casey – our ignorance was fostered by a Church and Irish State that colluded to bury the most despicable past crimes and sins against the most vulnerable children and young women.
The legislation was cleverly crafted to make it a condition of seeking compensation from the Redress Board that if claimants ever revealed details of the horrors visited on them, victims would be forced to return any settlement made to them.
What kind of mind would design laws that would add eternal silence to the suffering of the children and young women in industrial schools and laundries run by the Church – but sent to there by the State?
The State has another piece of legislation, the innocuously named Retention of Records Bill awaiting the approval of the Oireachtas. That law would keep all the records on child abuse uncovered by the Ryan report and Redress Board secret for 75 years. It will protect the Church and State from scrutiny for three generations – until long after the death of the victims that the Bill’s proposers claim to be protecting.
The latest revelations have moved Bishop Casey’s posthumous reputation from the Church’s Bold Boys’ Club to the Chamber of Horrors.