ANY INFORMATION Dublin’s archdiocese had about former priest and convicted child sex abuser Bill Carney “we shared with the gardaí”, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.
“I don’t know whether they followed these up or passed them on to the DPP,” he continued.
Dr Martin was speaking in Maynooth yesterday before last night’s screening of a BBC Newsnight report, which traced Carney to a Scottish address and followed him to the Canary Islands, where he was on holiday.
Described in the Murphy report as “a serial sexual abuser of children, male and female” and as “one of the most serious sexual abusers investigated by the commission”, in 1983 Carney pleaded guilty to two charges of indecent assault. In 1992 he was laicised.
The following year he received £30,000 from the archdiocese and, after a period working as a taxi driver in Dublin, he left Ireland in the mid-1990s.
“The information that I had [about Carney] is precisely the information that is in the Murphy report. There were rumours he was living in Scotland but there was no address. The first and only contact I had with Carney was about a month ago when I received a letter from him, no address on it, in which he talked about his marriage breaking down,” Dr Martin said.
He continued: “Nobody had the slightest idea that he was married. It came as a complete and utter surprise to me. That letter had a Spanish postmark on it which I sent to the gardaí. The letter had no address, no way of contacting him and the postmark wasn’t specific, as far as I could understand it . . . but I believe the BBC had already identified him there at that stage.
“He wrote to say his marriage had broken down,” Dr Martin continued. “It seemed to be a cri de coeur, but he gave no way for us of contacting him. He didn’t ask for anything, it was just basically setting out his story. To some extent the letter was marked by a real denial of the reality of his story.”
He described the Carney case as “a very interesting one, about what happens when a man is thrown out of the priesthood. You have much less control over him.”
Others, such as Ivan Payne, “where we have some bond, we pay him a little bit, we pay him an allowance”, could be tied “into monitoring procedures”.
