AUSTRALIA
ABC – PM
TIM PALMER: The chief commissioner of Victoria Police has promised a formal apology to a man driven out of the force for trying to bring a paedophile priest to justice.
The former officer Denis Ryan told the royal commission into child sex abuse today that his colleagues conspired to cover up the priest’s crimes in Mildura in the 1970s.
The commission was told a “Catholic mafia” operated in Victoria Police at the time and that the conspiracy went right to the top.
Samantha Donovan reports.
SAMANTHA DONOVAN: In 1956, when Denis Ryan was a young policeman on divvy van duty in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda he came across Catholic priest Father John Day for the first time.
DENIS RYAN: We decided to pull the car over and noticed that the driver was a well-known prostitute Hazel Hanrahan and we then went around to the other side of the car and there was another prostitute. And laying across with their head on the driver and the feet on the other prostitute was a man with his pants down around his ankles, genitals showing. He was wearing a catholic priest collar and on the floor was an empty sherry bottle.
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