The Right Reverend Eamon Casey
Ebullient Irish bishop and campaigner who left the country after it emerged that he had fathered a son
THE RIGHT REVEREND EAMON CASEY, who has died aged 89, was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Galway who resigned following the revelation in 1992 that he had fathered a son 17 years earlier, and that he had paid the boy’s mother, an American divorcee, some 75,000 Irish pounds from diocesan funds after negotiations with her lawyers.
An ebullient and gregarious figure, Casey was the most popular, the most socially involved, and the most dynamic campaigner against poverty and injustice of his generation of Irish bishops. He was also a noted bon
vivant, with a taste for fine claret and fast cars, which he frequently crashed. But he maintained that “any clergyman with more than four figures in the bank has lost the faith”.
Eamon Casey was born on April 23 1927 at Firies, near Tralee, Co Kerry, one of 10 children of a creamery manager. Raised in Co Limerick, he was educated at St Munchin’s College there and studied for the priesthood at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.
He was ordained in 1951 and became a curate in Limerick, where he said his social conscience was shaped by the misery he saw in working class housing estates. In 1960 he moved to Slough to work among Irish immigrants. Impressed by Casey’s efforts among the homeless, Cardinal Heenan of Westminster asked him to turn his Catholic Housing Aid Society into a national organisation in 1963.
In 1966 Casey also helped to found Shelter, in a spectacularly effective campaign to press government for action on homelessness. In 1968 he became chairman of Shelter, demonstrating great managerial and fund-raising acumen, and was helped by his television appearance in Cathy
Come Home, a powerful dramadocumentary. Casey’s chubby, grinning face and engaging manner endeared him to charity workers and prospective donors alike.
In 1969 he was recalled to Ireland to become Bishop of Kerry. At 42 he was the youngest member of the Irish hierarchy. The novelist Kate O’Brien asked: “Why is this young man of action, this Samaritan who wears his heart on his sleeve, being trapped into a mitre away from his great vocation?” Cardinal Heenan, in a sermon, said the appointment of Casey, a friend and father of the poor, was a sign of the changing Church.
But Casey’s mitre did not trap his effervescence and he launched a series of high-profile local campaigns. He ended the archaic ban on Saturday night dances in Kerry church halls, pressed for the maintenance of the compulsory Shannon airport stop-over for transatlantic traffic, which provided local jobs, blessed an unauthorised bridge to Valentia Island, and kept up a barrage of abuse of the government for failing to fund poverty programmes.
If he was criticised for any of his activities it was for his style, not his sincerity. When Cardinal Conway set up the Irish development agency Trocaire in 1973, Casey was appointed chairman. Trocaire, 20 per cent of whose budget was devoted to education and propaganda, supported liberation theology, and in El Salvador and Nicaragua backed bishops Romero and Ortega, incurring the anger of the Pentagon.
When, in 1983, the US government accused the agency of being antiAmerican, Casey organised a boycott by the Irish Catholic bishops of President Reagan’s visit to his ancestral home in Tipperary. Trocaire also embarrassed the Irish republic’s power generation company ESB, by claiming that it had driven people from their homes in the Philippines during construction of a hydro electric project under contract to the Marcos regime.
In 1974 Casey chaired a Dublin meeting of Cherish, a support organisation for unmarried mothers. Commending the women, he bitterly castigated fathers who failed to recognise their responsibility to their children. Unknown to his audience, his own unacknowledged son had just been born, the issue of a clandestine affair with Annie Murphy, a 26-yearold American divorcee.
Miss Murphy, a distant relative of the Bishop, had been sent to Ireland in the spring of 1973 to help her recover from a disastrous marriage and a miscarriage. In her book, Forbidden
Fruit, co- authored with the former Jesuit Peter de Rosa in 1993, she offered a lurid account of her relationship with the bishop, who, she said, had tried to browbeat her into having the child adopted to conceal the affair. She also suggested that he might have had other affairs. Describing his boudoir technique, she remarked: “He was a goddam bishop. Where had he learnt all this?”
In 1976 Bishop Casey was transferred to the more urban diocese of Galway, a move prompted by local agitation for a more liberal prelate to replace the arch conservative, Bishop Michael Browne. But although Casey happily wore the liberal tag bestowed by observers of his social conscience, his theology was conservative.
He kept a low profile in the public controversies over socio-sexual issues in the 1970s and 1980s but negotiated a secret accommodation with the medical staff at Galway’s Galvia Hospital, who agreed to ban sterilisation and in vitro fertilisation, both of which were against Catholic teaching, as well as amniocentesis, which was regarded as a prelude to abortion.
In 1986, after he was arrested and banned for drink-driving in London, he made a tearful public confession to the people of his diocese. In an editorial, The Irish Times praised the honesty and humility of this extrovert, warm-hearted and impulsive man whom car salesmen sought out – Bishop Casey, whose regular collisions ensured a brisk turnover in new models.
Having a preference for Italian cars, the bishop wrote off several Lancias, but also crashed a Mercedes. He was an occasional entrant in saloon car races at the Mondello Park circuit in Co Kildare.
In 1991 persistent rumours began to circulate about his affair with Annie Murphy, whose son Peter, now aged 17, was pressing for public acknowledgement by his father. Although several Irish newspapers were approached with the story, none dared publish a line. But the public whispering reached a pitch in May 1992 and the bishop resigned while on a visit to Rome.
In a statement, he said merely that he had left for personal reasons and would devote the rest of his active life to work on the missions. He disappeared from view for almost a year but was tracked down to a convent in Mexico by the author Gordon Thomas, who photographed the now bearded bishop and described his secluded but comfortable lifestyle.
Much embarrassment was caused to the Church authorities by the revelation that Casey had appropriated diocesan funds to give to Miss Murphy; later, it was announced that the losses had been made good by an unnamed well-wisher. Bishop Casey continued his exile in Central America, but returned to Ireland for brief visits to funerals and family occasions.
Having worked on the missions in rural Ecuador, Casey later found himself a retirement job in Britain in the tiny parish of Staplefield near Haywards Heath, Sussex.
Here he devoted himself to visiting the sick in the local hospital, where his ministry was greatly valued. Known as Fr Eamon, he was much loved by local people for his warm-hearted approach. The bishop having done penance for his sins, the people of God had clearly forgiven him for his transgressions.
In 2006, Casey, now almost 80, returned to Ireland, settling in the small east Galway village of Shanaglish. About a year after that he recorded several hours of interviews with an Irish folklorist called Maurice O’Keeffe. He did not discuss the circumstances of the scandal, but revealed that when he knew that his secret relationship was about to be exposed he went to the Vatican to hand in his resignation and “acknowledge [his] wrongdoing”.
The Pope’s representative, however, “wouldn’t accept it”, Casey claimed. “He said the Holy Father doesn’t want to accept it.” He also recalled a stay in a North American monastery in which he had twice set off the alarm by smoking (contrary to the rules) in his room late at night.
In 2011 Eamon Casey was admitted to a nursing home in Co Clare suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.