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Former Priest Jailed for Ten Years for Sexual Assault of 18 Boys

By Conor Gallagher
Irish Independent
July 8, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/former-priest-jailed-for-ten-years-for-sexual-assault-of-18-boys-29404208.html

A FORMER priest who had been on the run in Brazil for almost a decade has been jailed for ten years for abusing 18 boys during the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Peter Kennedy (74), a former member of the Kiltegan Fathers order, committed the abuse across five different counties as he was moved from parish to parish.

In the early 2000s many of his victims began to come forward causing Kennedy to leave Ireland for Brazil. He remained there for eight years before being deported to the UK in 2011. From there he was returned to Ireland to face these charges.

Kennedy was a missionary in Africa before serving in several parishes in Ireland. He would use his position as a priest to gain access to the boys and molest them.

In some instances he threatened them with damnation if they reported what he did and on one occasion told a boy that he (Kennedy) was an “angel of God and God didn’t mind what he did.”

Another boy was repeatedly abused when Kennedy visited the family home to pray with the child’s dying father and administer the last rites. While molesting him, Kennedy told the victim that “if he was a nice boy his father would be ok.”

Kennedy, with a former address in Ballinahown, Westmeath pleaded guilty to 27 counts of indecent assault in various areas of the country between 1968 and 1986.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that some of these charges are “sample counts” representing more that than one instance of abuse.

After hearing the evidence Judge Martin Nolan commented that by his count there were over 100 instances. One victim alone told gardai he was abused about 100 times.

Imposing a ten year sentence, Judge Nolan commented that Kennedy had “destroyed the lives of 18 boys for no other reasons than to satiate his own perverted needs.”

 

 

 

 

 




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