Nightmare Revived

Eamon Casey returns to haunt an already cowed Irish Catholic hierarchy. By Vincent Browne.

The story of Bishop Eamon Casey's flight from Ireland in advance of the disclosure that he had fathered a child, Peter, with an American woman, Annie Murphy, was the first of a series of "scandals" to break on the Irish Catholic Church. In hindsight it has proved the least scandalous of the series of embarrassing revelations, notably the clerical sex abuse scandals and the even worse scandal of cover-ups by the Irish Hierarchy and the Vatican. That is until now, with the revelation that a person was allegedly abused by Bishop Casey while he was serving in Ireland. But what we have since learnt of Bishop Casey's life before he fled from Ireland in May 1992 suggests that allegations of sex abuse are unlikely to be true.

The most intriguing of such insights came by way of a series of interviews by Veronica Guerin with Bishop Casey published in the Sunday Tribune in November 1993. Veronica Guerin was murdered in Dublin three years later in June 1996. Veronica Guerin first tracked Bishop Casey down to the parish in which he was working in Equador. Subsequently she conducted a series of interviews with him in Orlando, Florida and in New York city. In the course of these interviews he offered the following insights: "I feel I let down Annie, Peter, the people, my priests and my colleagues and I am very very sorry about this. I left a shadow over them all. Of course I let them down, very much so" Asked if he still loved Annie Murphy, he replied: "That is a very personal question and I am not prepared to answer it." Asked of there was any possibility that he and she would end up together, he replied: "None." Asked if he intended on coming back to Ireland he said: "Unquestionably…. Nobody is stopping me from going home but I don't wish to go until I can go back out of the glare of publicity and be allowed to be myself." Asked if the issue of sexuality was spoken of or discussed when he was a seminarian at Maynooth, he said : "Minimally. This is not a criticism of Maynooth but there should have been far more done to help students deal with their sexuality. This does not justify anything I did in my life, that is not the point. The attitude was that if you kept far away from women and said our prayers, you won't have a problem. There was no awareness that the feminine influence on one's life is quite positive."

Later in the interview he said: "Celibacy was unquestionably a factor. Two or three times in my seven years at Maynooth it became very much a factor and I had to engage in serious counselling sessions. There were no girls involved at the time". Talking about celibacy in his early days as a priest in London he said: "I sometimes began to feel very uneasy at the end of the day, it had nothing to do with sexuality. I didn't know what it was. It wasn't that I was looking for female company or a sexual experience. But living entirely outside a community with the companionship of fellow priests and working outside pastoral work I think disorientated me during that time for a while. I think that celibacy requires community in two senses. Firstly as a community to serve, to live and to be loved by and secondly in the sense of companionship. In London I had neither".

Veronica Guerin reported he wore his watch set on Irish time, even while in Equador. He said Bishop Brendan Commiskey, then Bishop of Ferns, was a great help to him in dealing with the breaking story of his relationship with Annie Murphy. "He advised me with whom and how to set up my meeting in Rome. I went over (to Rome in the week immediately preceding his resignation as Bishop of Galway) to meet Archbishop Regali, secretary to the Congregation of bishops. We spent two hours together. He was most understanding. I explained what the position was and why I felt it was in the best interests of the Church and myself that I resign and he said he would have to talk to Cardinal Gantin and then Cardinal Gantin would talk to the Holy Father and he (Archbishop Regali) asked me to wait until that had been done. I rang my Vicar General Fr Jim McLoughlin (the person who succeeded him as Bishop of Galway and who died recently) that night from London and told him about my resignation".

On the advice of Bishop Commiskey he sought legal advice on the night before he left Ireland. One of the lawyers who advised him was senior counsel, Patrick McEntee. Asked if he thought he had a responsibility to ensure Annie Murphy would not become pregnant he said: "Because of the fact that it happened it was impulsive. It was premeditated, then I was almost certain it would happen". He said Annie Murphy did not want him to have anything to do with the child and made that very, very clear. Vincent Browne.