Terry Prone: Eamonn Casey — Man of the people with life of lies and sex crimes
A new documentary focuses on the worst of Casey: child abuse. But it also strips away the last remnants of a once-golden reputation.
Originally published in the Irish Examiner.
He was the first — and mercifully the only — populist Irish Bishop. A legend in his own lavish lunchtime, protected against naysayers by his blustering man-of-the people persona. Uniquely loved, he was, for his come-all-ye-singing accessibility. Fans told eye-rolling stories of his dangerous, liquor-infused driving: sure wasn’t he a terrible man, all the same? One of our own. Authentic.
As a teenager in Catholic Ireland, I was aware that my parents viewed Eamonn Casey as an intellectual waste of space, but aware, too, that – in common with the small number of critics at the time — they viewed him as no worse than that.
An exclusive in the Mail on Sunday establishes that he was considerably worse than that. Anne Sheridan’s lead story states: “The Vatican banned Bishop Eamonn Casey from public ministry for life after receiving multiple child sexual abuse allegations against him.” An RTÉ documentary in association with the Mail on Sunday, which airs on Monday night, investigates how the Catholic Church handled at least five child sexual abuse allegations against the former Bishop of Galway. It puts the final nail in the coffin of the once impregnable populist bishop’s reputation.
Casey shared with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump an understanding that the capacity to entertain may be the greatest defence against almost any criticism. Not that there was much criticism of Casey, back in the day. Because — weirdly — back in the day, he was seen as the embodiment of church modernity. He personified a move away from dogmatism to an easy popularity based on a generalised goodwill. He didn’t share his fellow fraud Fr Michael Cleary’s overt condemnations of men leaving the priesthood, for example. He was more given to ready sympathy and non-judgementalism.
He came to power, remember, when Ireland’s mass media was an open market for a bishop who talked like a human. Who was great craic. Good for a laugh. A man you’d be glad to have a pint with.
The first brick in his reputation was homelessness. Homelessness, then as now, was the issue of the day, this being the time of the seminal TV programme Cathy Come Home, and Casey was the expert, the go-to-guy for broadcasters and journalists addressing it.
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