Godfrey's Gospel: Sexual predator Casey should be reinterred

A SECRET is something that someone somewhere doesn’t want anyone else to know about. But if two or more know something, then it is no longer a secret – and as night follows day, the facts of a case will also come out.

How true when it comes to the late Eamonn Casey. In case you are wondering have I got his title wrong, I have not. That is deliberate on my part. He may have been a priest and later a bishop, but to refer to him as either is only an insult to all the good men who have had to live with the shame of what Casey and his ilk did to innocent and gullible people in the past.

Let’s be clear: there is no place in society, modern or otherwise, for people who carried on, and perhaps still do, like Eamonn Casey and other sexual predators.

Thank God, we have finally woken up in this country. No-one, irrespective of whatever title they hold or position they occupy, should be free to do whatever they like.

No matter what the consequences, they must be held accountable in life or in death for the pain and suffering they inflicted on others. Eamonn Casey is one such individual, although he was not alone. I got tired of covering court cases involving members of the clergy and all they got up to. Some mimed remorse, but if you asked me to be truthful about the number that were actually ashamed of what they did or showed any remorse, I’d have to say it was minuscule. Okay, the Eamonn Casey scandal was extremely high profile and, like a lot of cowards, he did a runner, first to England and then on to ‘The Missions’, as working in Africa was often referred to.

In hindsight and in light of all that has been made public since, who in their right mind would send that man anywhere to administer the word of God? He certainly gives that concept a bad name. You could argue that those covering for him were ignorant of all the facts, but as we have since found out, that is not entirely true. However, the Church did, as we later discovered, what was the norm for such cases: they simply moved him on to somewhere else.

In light of the revelations in the most recent RTÉ investigation into the carry-on of Casey, I wonder how the late Gay Byrne or members of the audience of the 2 April 1993 edition of the Late Late Show would react if they had the opportunity to again interview or question Annie Murphy, the woman who had a child for Casey in 1974 and then wrote a book about her relationship with the man.

It was this breaking story which prompted Casey to run in the first place. At that time, anyone associated with the clergy was held in high esteem and their word was taken as Gospel. So naturally, many people immediately jumped to Casey’s defence. But the subsequent exposure of a litany of abuse to others put paid to any doubts people had about the man. Which then begs the question: why, when he died, was he buried with pomp and ceremony by his previous diocese?

That is inexcusable. They knew about the rape and abuse of his niece and others by the man. He had been reported to the authorities in Ireland and in England as far back as 2005. Compensation had been paid to victims, counselling had been provided at diocesan expense, yet what happened? A big farewell with up to 1,600 in attendance, including the President of Ireland, at a funeral Mass in Galway cathedral. And just to add insult to injury, burial in the crypt beneath the church.

Fr Brian D’Arcy, a priest I have the utmost respect for, was right when he immediately blamed the diocese and Rome for allowing this catastrophe to happen. He was right when he said the Church should have defrocked Eamonn Casey because there are protocols in place governing how such a person is buried, which would have ensured the events surrounding Casey’s death could not have taken place.

But as is often the case in Ireland, we have a tendency to canonise the dead – suddenly all the wrongs they did in life are forgotten about and we applaud the one or two good things they may have done.

Thanks to the bravery of some of Casey’s victims, whatever plaudits were wrongly given to this man will now be reversed, and hopefully he will be interred in a grave more reflective of the type of man he really was.