Over two days this week RTÉ Radio 1’s LiveLine programme was bombarded with callers demanding that the remains of former Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey should be removed from their place of honour beneath Galway cathedral.
The calls came in the wake of fresh revelations of child abuse levelled against the deceased bishop who gained global infamy in 1992 when it was revealed that he defrauded the Galway diocese of £70,000 to support a child, Peter, he fathered with American woman, Annie Murphy, in the early 1970s.
After his death in Co Clare aged 89 in 2017, Dr Casey was interred in one of only two remaining tombs within the crypt below Galway’s Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St Nicholas.
Dr Casey, who was bishop of Kilmacduagh and Galway from 1976 to 1992, was the subject of an RTÉ documentary last Monday – Bishop Casey’s Buried Secrets - which revealed that Catholic authorities received four separate complaints of child sexual abuse against Casey, and other ‘child safeguarding’ concerns.
One of the woman interviewed by journalists was Casey’s niece, Patricia Donovan, who claimed she had been raped and sexually assaulted from the age of five by Casey for more than a decade. She said that some of the alleged assaults happened in Galway Cathedral and at the Bishop’s residence in the city.
“I can’t see how I would ever stand in that building again as long as that man is buried there,” said a Seamus Heaney, the first of many callers to Joe Duffy’s radio show after the documentary was aired the previous night. Heaney said he felt Galway’s cathedral – the last ever stone cathedral built in Europe – was now a “temple of evil”.
In a statement issued by the Irish Bishops’ Conference, Bishop of Galway Michael Duignan said he was aware of recent media coverage of Bishop Casey, and the profound distress it caused. “I share these feelings. My priority is that any person who was betrayed or harmed by Bishop Casey is heard and that their experiences are appropriately acknowledged and recognised.”
In relation to the calls for a removal of Bishop Casey’s remains from Galway Cathedral, a spokesman for the Galway diocese said he was aware of the conversation online and in the media, but had “no further comment to make at this time.”
The Galway Advertiser was in contact with a number of diocesan priests and other religious in Galway this week who spoke off the record.
One priest summed up the dilemma for local church leaders in Galway: “There is a huge constituency of feeling here that [the diocese] must navigate. Its actions may affect Patricia Donovan, Peter and Annie Murphy, survivors of abuse, angry and upset parishioners demanding action, and those who hold strong beliefs about not disturbing the remains of the dead. And that is all before all the legal and other concerns the [state] authorities will have.”
This week’s documentary revealed that the Vatican and elements of Ireland’s ecclesiastical hierarchy was aware of child abuse allegations against Casey from at least 2005, and that a number of High Court cases regarding sexual abuse had been settled out of court. At the time of Casey’s funeral in Galway in 2017, a small number of commentators noted the absence of the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s permanent diplomat in Dublin, from the funeral.
Despite acknowledging Casey’s sins and known fraud at the time of his funeral, a number of prominent politicians and church officials eulogised the former bishop, who was seen in his heyday as a media-savvy moderniser with a strong social conscience.
