IRELAND
Irish Independent
MAEVE SHEEHAN AND SHANE HICKEY – 05 MAY 2013
He was known for decades as the foul-mouthed, flashy priest whose abusive friendships with vulnerable children forced him out of the church.
But a subdued Bill Carney appeared before the London court that last Friday ordered his extradition to Ireland to face 34 charges of indecent assault on eight males and two females.
Now 73 and still imposing at 6ft 4in, a green jumper covered his large gut. He stared around the courtroom, only speaking to confirm his name and age. His solicitor mentioned his heart condition and listed his many medications. Afterwards, he was sent back to Holloway prison, where he remains this weekend.
When his shocking past as child abuser was first exposed by the Commission of Investigation into clerical abuse in 2009, Carney had reinvented himself as a respectable married man and owner of a guest house in the Scottish golfing town of St Andrews, where he passed his days perfecting his swing. Since then, his marriage has collapsed but he continued to live freely in the UK, pursued occasionally by the media and blaming his past on his drinking.
On April 25, Carney was arrested in the leafy village of Bidford in Warrickshire, where he has been living in recent months.
The latest alleged offences occurred during the late Seventies and Eighties when Bill Carney was at his most “crude and loutish” as a priest in various Dublin parishes. One former resident of a children’s home in south Dublin recalled how, as a young seminarian at Clonliffe College, Bill Carney, inveigled his way in as chaplain, delighting the nuns and making himself “the children’s favourite”.
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