BishopAccountability.org

Minister faces questions over sex abuse priest

By Sean O’driscoll
Times (UK)
May 22, 2017

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/minister-faces-questions-over-sex-abuse-priest-bvjpghjfq

Joseph Maskell used counselling as a front to abuse schoolgirls

An independent TD has asked the health minister to reveal how long a former US priest who sexually abused schoolgirls was employed by the South Eastern Health Board as a psychologist.

Joseph Maskell, who is also suspected of involvement in the murder of a nun in 1969 and is the subject of a new Netflix documentary series, worked for the health board and in private practice in Wexford in the 1990s. The Ferns diocese warned the board to stop him from practising on a number of occasions, according to a file disclosed by the diocese.

Clare Daly, the Socialist Party TD for Dublin North, asked Simon Harris for details on Maskell’s employment after the HSE told The Times that the information would not be released because of data protection laws. Her question was sent in on Friday on the same day that Netflix launched The Keepers, a seven-part series on the crimes of Maskell, who is accused of sexually abusing girls at a Catholic high school in Baltimore, Maryland. He died in 2001.

The Ferns diocese said that he may also have worked in a Kilkenny hospital, after locating correspondence with the Kilkenny bishop. Maskell met with two South Eastern Health Board doctors to discuss his case in 1996. In March 1998 he gave a written undertaking to the board that he would not treat young people under the age of 18. In Baltimore he had used counselling as a front for sexually abusing teenage girls.




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