THE STORY of how a Belfast family helped expose Fr Brendan Smyth’s history of child sex abuse will be told in a documentary to be broadcast tonight on RTÉ television.
Brendan Smyth – Betrayal of Trust, a two-hour docu-drama on one of the most notorious Irish clerical child sex abusers, is based on a book by journalist Chris Moore. It tells how a Belfast family helped expose Smyth's litany of abuse which led to the collapse of the Fianna Fáil/Labour government in 1994 and the later exposure of widespread clerical child sex abuse in the Irish Catholic Church.
The programme, which will be shown on RTÉ 1 television at 9.30pm, opens with a scene from 1975 depicting the Catholic primate, Cardinal Seán Brady, then a 36-year-old canon lawyer, swearing two teenage boys to secrecy as he concludes his investigation into their allegations of abuse by Fr Smyth.
Cardinal Brady believed the teenagers’ allegations and informed his then bishop, the late Dr Francis McKiernan, at the time.
But neither he, Bishop McKiernan nor Fr Smyth’s superior – the abbot of Kilnacrott Abbey in Co Cavan Fr Kevin Smith, who had also been informed of Fr Brady’s conclusions – reported Smyth’s crimes to civil authorities.
It meant Smyth’s sexual abuse of children continued unhindered until 1994 when he was jailed in Northern Ireland for the abuse of four members of the Belfast family depicted in the programme.
Their abuse occurred in the 1980s, the decade after Cardinal Brady’s investigation. That was also more than 40 years after Smyth’s Norbertine congregation first became aware of his proclivities.
Whenever there were allegations against him, his religious superiors moved him from parish to parish around Ireland as well as to the US, Wales and Italy.
When Cardinal Brady’s role in that canon law investigation emerged last year he said he would only resign if asked to do so by the pope. Pope Benedict has made no such request.
The cardinal agreed he knew he was dealing with crimes at the time of the canonical inquiry, but said: “I did not feel it was my responsibility to denounce the actions of Brendan Smyth to the police.”
A woman who was serially abused by Smyth for four years following that canonical inquiry conducted by Cardinal Brady in 1975 told The Irish Times: “I was raped, abused and had pictures taken of my body. I was 13 when it began in 1974 and it went on for five years. If he had done something, my life would have been so different,” she said.
Two other schoolgirls Smyth abused at the time have since taken their own lives.
