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	The 'Curse' of the Paedophile Priest Lives on By Sam Smyth Irish Independent March 15, 2010 http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/sam-smyth-the-curse-of-the-paedophile-priest-lives-on-2099262.html IRELAND -- HE is the notorious paedophile priest who brought down a Taoiseach and government in the last century and the Catholic Primate of All Ireland could be his latest casualty in 2010. Fr Brendan Smyth attached himself to Cardinal Sean Brady 35 years ago and the toxic connection will determine the outcome of a High Court case. That court case, and the publicity arising from it, will determine if Cardinal Brady can credibly remain as the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Taoiseach Albert Reynolds didn't know Smyth and had no dealings with the serial child abuser but it didn't matter when he was linked to him, however distantly, in 1994. The Taoiseach didn't know that a warrant for Smyth's extradition alleging child abuse in Northern Ireland was ignored in the Attorney General's Office. But the public anger that followed the revelation of Smyth's deplorable crimes against children sealed the fate of Mr Reynolds and his government. Smyth eventually gave himself up to the authorities in Northern Ireland and died in prison in 1997 but the curse that followed him didn't go to the grave with him. More than a generation ago, in 1975, Cardinal Brady, then a teacher and part-time secretary to the Bishop of Kilmore, required two of Smyth's alleged victims to swear oaths of secrecy. The two children, a girl and a boy, who had complained, were told that the penalty for telling anyone but an "authorised priest" about their abuse was excommunication. And it would have been made clear to the two victims that excommunication from the Catholic Church was worse than anything imaginable in this life. Cardinal Brady took on the role of a canon lawyer at two meetings in 1975 where allegations of Smyth's depravity were noted. Neither the gardai nor any other authority was informed and Smyth was allowed to continue his abuse. There had been a flood of complaints about Smyth's sexual abuse of children in Ireland the US and the UK -- the first was in 1968. Later it emerged that Smyth had been sexually abusing children with impunity since the late 1940s but with each new complaint the Catholic Church moved him. Successive governments were happy to outsource their responsibilities for education and health to a church that had a power-sharing arrangement with the politicians. The state gave the church enormous sums of money to provide care for children and eventually it was their casual cruelty to those children that was their undoing. Ireland was changing in the early 1990s: a woman, Mary Robinson, was elected president at the beginning of the decade and the first signs of prosperity were apparent. Smyth's sexual torture of children was first revealed in a television documentary in October 1994 and by December Reynolds was an ex-Taoiseach. And 1994 was the year that Sean Brady was elevated to Archbishop of Armagh and generally regarded as a safe pair of hands into which the future of the Catholic Church could be entrusted. It seemed inevitable that he would be made a cardinal and in November 2007 he was -- and two years later, in November 2009, the Murphy report was published. Judge Yvonne Murphy's report was a truly shocking chronicle of how the Catholic Church had systematically covered up child abuse. It detailed the sort of depravity that Cardinal Brady knew about from his dealings with Brendan Smyth's victims in 1975. Now, the legacy of the Primate of All Ireland could be decided by one of those victims in evidence to the High Court.
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