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  Priest Abuser Left Trail of Destruction and Suicides

By Olenka Frenkiel
Irish Independent
March 9, 2010

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/olenka-frenkiel--priest-abuser-left-trail-of-destruction-and-suicides-2092299.html

IRELAND -- ALL the children in Ayrfield knew the fun-loving, smiling Fr Bill Carney. Not just through school. And not just his altar boys. He also ran the Boy Scouts and loved to take kids swimming.

His door was always open. There was always Coke in the fridge and in the 1980s he had the very latest thing to lure his prey -- a video player.

Grown-ups disapproved of his swearing and crazy driving, but the church was still so trusted, no-one suspected the truth.

"Paul came to me and told me Carney raped him," recalled his mother Bridie Dwyer, who still lives in Ayrfield on Dublin's northside.

At 13, he'd gone with other boys to watch videos at the priest's house. But at 2am, he was back.

"Thought you were going for a sleepover?" Bridie asked as he pushed past her.

"Didn't want to stay," he replied and shut the door.

"That's when he'd been raped but I didn't know."

Carney pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault against two altar boys at Howth district court in 1983. Four other charges against him were withdrawn.

However, the judge did not send him to prison, instead applying the Probation Act after learning Carney was receiving psychiatric treatment.

Paul Dwyer was not one of the original complainants.

In 1992, the Catholic Church convicted Carney, under canon law, of child sexual abuse.

But he refused to leave the parish house. The Murphy report revealed he only left after he was paid IR£30,000 by the Dublin archdiocese.

He went to Britain. First to Cheltenham and then Scotland where he's lived for the last 10 years running a guest house in St Andrews, playing golf and enjoying the famous club's facilities, the Old Course, the showers, the spa, the sauna.

In 2004, Paul Dwyer went to gardai in Dublin about his abuse 21 years earlier.

They told his mother they had two other similar complaints and sent the file to the DPP.

But it came back with bad news. There was still not enough evidence to prosecute.

"So the case stopped," Bridie said.

A couple of weeks later, Paul committed suicide.

That same year, in Scotland, Carney married, aged 54.

I established that the Irish authorities knew his address. But no one, either from the church or the Irish government, warned his wife about his past.

"This must never happen again," Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said in November, announcing that all new evidence had been passed months before to An Garda Siochana.

When I tracked Carney down to a sea-front restaurant during a winter sun holiday in the Canary Islands, and then to his flat, he was affronted by my questions.

He hadn't read the Murphy report, so he refused to comment.

When I gave him a copy, he refused to talk on camera. When it was off, I asked him about his convictions back in the early 1980s.

"I was told if I plead guilty the press would be kept away," Carney said.

"But were you guilty?" I asked. "Did you abuse those children?"

His answer was "no".

But the Murphy report states Carney was a serial sex abuser of both male and female children.

I asked him Bridie's question: "Why did you rape Paul Dwyer?"

He thought for a while and repeated the word.

"Rape. I'd like to explain that. Put it into context."

What kind of context, I wondered could excuse the rape of a child?

No answer.

I told him Paul took his life. He looked up at me. Paul was not the only suicide among the children he'd known in Ayrfield parish.

I have the names of five others. But locals say there are more.

"People exaggerate," he said.

"Yes, I suppose they do," I conceded.

"Maybe it was only four, or three. Does that make it okay?"

After a pause, he said: "I didn't know Paul was dead."

"Are you still abusing children?" I asked.

He looked insulted, but his answer begged more questions.

"I haven't done that in 26 years and I have had no inclination."

Was that an admission he had abused before?

No answer. In any case, I pointed out, the Murphy report tells a different story, that his abuse continued after his convictions in 1983.

We agreed to meet two days later after he'd read it.

This was his statement: "It's Monday 22 February 2010. I found your behaviour on Saturday very upsetting and distressful. It was most degrading. I have read the report six or seven times and I would dispute all of it except that I pleaded guilty to the two charges in 1983 and the matter was dealt with by the court and I was sentenced. It is now 26 years later and I continue to get my life back together one day at a time and that is all I have to say and I've signed it Bill Carney."

Again he was determined not to be drawn by my questions, the only flicker was when I asked if he felt remorse for what he'd done.

He looked up and said: "What do you think?"

"I can't read you. If you do, say so."

He paused and shook his head.

"Bridie Dwyer?" I asked. "No word for her?"

A longer pause. But the same answer.

"I've no comment to make."

He'd made his choice and left.

After Paul Dwyer took his life, Bridie Dwyer embarked on a civil case and asked the gardai to let her see the file on her son's case.

She was refused on grounds of confidentiality.

The letter she received in 2006 was from John O'Mahoney, then Detective Superintendent and now Assistant Garda Commissioner, assigned the task of investigating whether anyone should be prosecuted as a result of the revelations in the Murphy report. These investigations, his office has said, are ongoing.

Bill Carney remains free to disappear beneath the radar again.

 
 

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