(IRELAND)
Extra.ie [Dublin, Ireland]
June 19, 2026
By Jamie McCarron
A victim of serial paedophile Bill Kenneally, who died in prison yesterday, said ‘the world is a better place without him’.
Jason Clancy also said that he’s glad the former basketball coach lived long enough to see the release of a damning report into his crimes.
A victim of serial paedophile Bill Kenneally, who died in prison yesterday, said ‘the world is a better place without him’.
Jason Clancy also said that he’s glad the former basketball coach lived long enough to see the release of a damning report into his crimes.
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Kenneally used his position as a basketball coach to abuse teenagers in Waterford, and became one of the country’s most notorious sex offenders after his arrest in 2013 and his first conviction three years later.
A victim of serial paedophile Bill Kenneally, who died in prison yesterday, said ‘the world is a better place without him’.
Jason Clancy also said that he’s glad the former basketball coach lived long enough to see the release of a damning report into his crimes.
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STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Kenneally used his position as a basketball coach to abuse teenagers in Waterford, and became one of the country’s most notorious sex offenders after his arrest in 2013 and his first conviction three years later.
The 75-year-old died in the early hours of yesterday morning in Midlands Prison in the tenth year of his 19-year sentence for the sexual assault of over a dozen boys between 1979 and 1990.
Kenneally had complicated health problems and had been under palliative care for several weeks after having had part of his leg amputated earlier this year.
His death comes just one week after a South East Commission of Investigation report into the handling of his case was published.
The commission examined the response of gardaí, Basketball Ireland, politicians and members of the Catholic Church to allegations about his sexual abuse.
The report found that his sexual abuse had become known to two senior Garda officers, as well as Kenneally’s relatives in politics and a senior clergyman, in the late 1980s, but it took until a formal complaint in 2012 for him to be brought to justice.
Mr Clancy, who brought the complaint, told RTÉ Radio’s News at One yesterday that ‘if [Kenneally] was going to pass, I’m delighted he passed after the report was published.
‘When I heard the news this morning, I was shocked but I just feel like the universe sent us full closure,’ he said.
‘We were totally vindicated with the commission’s findings last week, and then to hear that Bill Kenneally has passed away, that gives us full closure now. I don’t celebrate anybody passing. I’m not jumping up and down with joy that he’s dead or I’m not sad that he’s dead.
‘If he had died two weeks earlier, it would have been a hard pill to swallow because he never would have heard what the findings were, but I am actually delighted that he did get to hear that.’
On Tuesday, some of his victims met with Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan who committed to a full State apology, likely to be issued in the coming weeks.
Mr O’Callaghan admitted that there had been a ‘clear dereliction of duty’ by senior gardaí in charge of investigating a complaint against Kenneally in 1987.
Kenneally gave evidence to the public inquiry in 2024, stating that he had told gardaí in the boardroom of a Garda station, ‘what I was doing’.
Mr Clancy said that Kenneally had been ‘in complete denial that he was a paedophile’ during the inquiry and that ‘he was still as dangerous then as he was back when we were kids’. He said: ‘The world is a better place without him. Children are safer in Ireland without him.
You have to take solace in that.
‘The gravity of it [the abuse] was off the Richter scale, it was repugnant. He did things to us you wouldn’t do to a farm animal.’ The commission’s report noted that the abuser’s family had significant influence in Waterford civil and political life, with three generations of the family serving as TDs, senators, city councillors and mayors for Fianna Fáil for almost 60 years.
Kenneally’s cousin Brendan, a former minister of state who was a TD for Waterford for 17 years as well as a senator for five years, was criticised by the commission for failing to contact child protection agencies after he was made aware of the abuse in 2001 while he was a member of the Dáil.
The commission recommended that the Law Reform Commission urgently consider introducing ‘misconduct in public office’ as an offence, a recommendation which Mr O’Callaghan has accepted and which was welcomed by Mr Clancy.
The survivor told RTÉ that he decided to file a complaint about abuse by Kenneally in 2012 after seeing the coach’s name on the website of a basketball club for young people.
‘I’m a father of four children. I knew the day had come I had to do something,’ he said.
Following the trial, Mr Clancy said he struggled with his mental health and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for eight months in recent years.
‘People said to me, “If you didn’t do what you did, how would you feel?” Either way I would have ended up in St Pat’s because the guilt I would have had to live with would have destroyed me,’ he remarked.
‘The huge thing out of this is obviously the State apology, but getting legislation changed in the country is just massive.’