April 24, 1927 - Eamon Casey
Casey's public profile was built on moral authority — a prominent Irish bishop, a champion of global justice causes, a familiar face in the media — which made the eventual accounting of his private conduct particularly consequential for the institutional Church in Ireland. The 1992 revelation that he had fathered a son and misappropriated church funds to conceal the relationship was damaging enough; the subsequent allegations of sexual abuse, including those made by his niece describing years of assault beginning in her childhood, belong to a different order of severity entirely. His case sits within the broader history of clerical abuse in Ireland, where public standing and institutional protection repeatedly enabled harm to persist across decades.
From Wikipedia
Eamonn Casey (24 April 1927 – 13 March 2017) was an Irish Catholic priest who served as bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh in Ireland from 1976 to 1992. He was appointed Chairman of Trócaire following the organisation’s establishment in 1973, where he shone a spotlight on situations of injustice overseas, particularly in El Salvador, South Africa, Mozambique, Uganda, Malawi and the Philippines. His resignation in 1992, after it was revealed he had had an affair with an American woman, Annie Murphy, was a significant event in the history of the Irish Catholic Church.
Subsequently, several women accused Casey of sexual abuse, with two receiving compensation following a High Court trial. One of the women, his niece Patricia Donovan, alleged in 2019 that she was repeatedly raped by Casey when she was five years old and was sexually assaulted by him for more than a decade. Writing in The Irish Times, historian Diarmaid Ferriter described Casey as "a sexist hypocrite", The Herald reports that he "liked fast cars... and was banned for drink driving", and numerous outlets reported on his fraudulent use of church funds amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
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