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.
An investigation into the Catholic Church's handling of allegations against the former Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey.#BishopCaseysBuriedSecrets | Tonight at 9.35pm | @RTEplayer pic.twitter.com/x16ubsj38Y
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) July 22, 2024
But is this the end of Bishop Casey’s story and his secret life or are there yet more chapters to be written?
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