Eamon Casey March 15, 2017
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Uncategorized.trackback
Looked at this footage today as a reminder of the death of Eamon Casey. The self satisfaction, smugness and I suppose the hatred of the members of the Audience and indeed Gay Byrne to Annie Murphy is incredible. A narrative that she was telling lies, that she had enticed the poor Bishop and so on.
I was trying to explain his popularity and charisma . He was a bit of a rogue but all within the confines of The Church. A regular on the Late Late and of course outspoken too on many issues to do with US Foreign Policy.
When the Annie Murphy story broke, it sent the country into shock. I know we had great fun at home slagging my parents. I’m adopted and we joked that Bishop Casey could be my father. There was denial but most of all a sense of betrayal by many Catholics who had idolised him. It certainly accelerated the decline of the Church here .
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Gordon Thomas died on March 3. I mention it only so I can mention how, even now, the Sindo can’t bring itself to admit any error over his ‘interview’ with Casey:
“Lots of pictures were taken and questions were posed, but the Bishop was not for talking,” said Willie Kealy, who was deputy editor of the paper at the time.
“After this sensational scoop was published (Sunday, April 11, 1993) the bishop sought to discredit it by distancing himself from the words attributed to him, saying it was not an interview, which indeed it wasn’t. It wasn’t an interview of any kind, just a great scoop of finding the controversial cleric.”
(http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/life-and-death-of-thriller-author-who-tracked-down-bishop-casey-35522634.html)
May they both rest in peace. The Sindo, on the other hand…
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Indeed
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I can remember in the Irish Times at the time, there was an active and vocal lobby advocating sitting on the Annie Murphy story. The IT eventually broke the story but there was a delay of some weeks and not all were happy. All to protect Casey of course, whose activities in Latin America had won him friends in certain political circles.
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Gene Kerrigan says the IT delay was partly due to the paper’s
Protestant/ Unionist background, and that they were worried if they broke the story without other sources backing it up that the Church would just say “Oh look, the IT is spewing anti-Catholic propaganda again!”
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Gene Kerrigan didn’t work at the IT at the time, or any time. I did. He may be right but I can only speak of what I experienced which was that Casey was seen as a progressive and a good guy and the fear was that the story would serve to undermine him.
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It wasn’t long before the country discovered that Bishop Casey was far from being the worst of them.
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I think it was Brendan Smyth that followed soon afterwards and it’s just gone on and on since then
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And didn’t that make resisting an Irish Times’ cover up regarding casey all the more important?
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Sorry, I should have pointed out that piece of info comes from Kerrigan and Pat Brennan’s book “This Great Little Nation”. As you said, Kerrigan never worked at the IT.
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did the clique you refer to in the Irish times contribute to the tone Murphy received after the story broke?
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So true IEL, the disbelief is so obvious. The attitude of ‘how could she be telling the truth’. Urghhhhh..
The Broken Elbow – all too believable what you’re saying there.
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I’d never actually watched this before and it is pretty staggering. Not to mention bizarre. From the piece itself, its clear that this interview happened after Casey had acknowledged that the child was his. And yet the people in it are picking over details of her story to insist that Murphy is lying.
In the interview they even acknowledge that a relationship had taken place.
Its a sort of a say-it-ain’t-so-joe moment.
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Interestingly, I had never seen the LS segment because I wasn’t in Ireland at the time it happened. I was living in New York and learned of the story because it was the full-front-page headline story on the New York Post. It wasn’t just in Ireland that this story resonated.
I have to be honest and admit though, that I was actually shocked at the time. I was not at all an observant catholic, nor was I a believer nor an admirer of the church, but it was the first time that I really understood that the church hierarchy did not even live by their own odd standards.
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I remember watching it at the time and my parents would have been very anti Annie Murphy. Pretty sure there was a commentary from my Dad along the lines of her being a liar each time Annie Murphy was confronted about a fact in her book.
That was it though the hierarchy were no longer seen as infallible.
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I think this whole episode speaks to the need of allowing priests to marry. Obviously it would not have entirely squared this circle, but in comparison to the later findings (sex abuse scandals) this seems positively mundane. I was very close to having my wedding mass done by a married priest. But I backed down at the last minute over baptismal concerns. Irony of ironies I still haven’t baptized my son and he’s eight now.
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Understandable. Oddly I went the opposite route, civil ceremony for the first baptism in the second. But now it is all the creatures choice.
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