LIFFORD (IRELAND)
The Irish News [Belfast, Northern Ireland]
October 10, 2026
By Conor Coyle
Decoy who posed as a 14-year-old when engaging with Gallagher speaks to The Irish News
A predator priest renewed his ordination vows on the morning of Holy Thursday last year, hours before he was arrested and charged with child sex offences.
Fr Edward Gallagher also used the same mobile number given out to parishioners to engage in the sexual abuse of more than 60 children.
The charges relate to dates between June 2023 and April 2025 and include 43 counts of attempted sexual communication with a child under 16, 43 charges of indecent images of children, 13 counts of possession of indecent images of a child, two counts of possessing images of a child and possessing an extreme pornographic image.
There were also five counts of trying to encourage a child to engage in sexual activity, attempted sexual communication with a child under 16 and disturbing indecent images. He is due to be sentenced on December 9.
The diocese has said steps are now underway to remove Gallagher from the priesthood.
His arrest and charge came after a sting operation involving ‘paedophile hunters’ outside a Derry hotel in 2025.
Fresh details of how the predator priest was caught by one of several groups devoted to catching paedophiles online have now emerged.
Speaking to The Irish News, the founder of the Justice Reborn group and the decoy who posed as a 14-year-old child described Gallagher as a “beast” who intended to meet the boy at his caravan across the border in Buncrana for sex.
The decoy said he had been working for the group for four months and had a profile set up on several mainstream social media apps used by children and teenagers. He said he was contacted by a person by the name of ‘Eamon Gallen’ on 2 April 2025.
“Within my first message was notifying him of my age so he was well aware of how old he was, I told him I was 14.
“After a little bit of chat, he started getting into the sexual messages, sharing photographs and talking about how he was getting aroused.
“He persistently asked for pictures of me semi-dressed and totally undressed state.
“He sent pictures of himself in an undressed state, including his bottom half.”
Many of the details of the conversations between the two parties are too sexually explicit for publication.
“He initiated a meeting, to be arranged for 13 April for the purpose of bringing me, a 14-year-old child, to a caravan he owned in Buncrana to perform sexual acts with me.
“I shared all of this with the founder of the group for her advice, because this was a vile, vile man.
“95% of his chat was highly sexual, there was little chatting normally and everything I said was what a child would say. Nothing misleading and no entrapment.”
An April 13 meeting had been arranged by Gallagher in Buncrana to meet the child, but was cancelled by the priest who had been “called away for work”.
Despite this, the group say they had gathered enough evidence of Gallagher’s “vile” activities that they could contact the police and make them aware of their plans to confront him and later provide evidence for a criminal case.
By this time, the group had managed to cross-check a mobile number used on one of the messaging apps to one used by Gallagher for his pastoral duties.
“The mobile number attached to the app he was using was the same number that was readily available to his parishioners,” the founder of Justice Reborn said.
“With a number like that it was very easy to find out who he was.
“There was no attempt to hide the number, there are lots of different apps he could have chosen where he wouldn’t have had to give a mobile number, but he chose this one and never attempted to hide it.
“A lot of them think that because they have given a false name, that that’s them covered.
“We were at the start looking for an Eamon Gallen as he had referred to himself as.
“Then we checked the mobile number. We were both on the phone together when we discovered he was a priest.
“He will regret that day the rest of his life.”
On Holy Thursday, 17 April 2025, Gallagher had renewed his ordination vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in Derry that morning. By the end of the day he would be placed into custody, suspected of child sex offences.
“We followed every move of him that day, and we watched him going in and do his ordination in the chapel up in Derry.
“There he is, standing, taking all these vows. He was standing there knowing what he’s done.”
The group posted a 13 minute live video on April 17, 2025 in which Gallagher is confronted by a security team which presents the evidence that has been gathered against him, while he is informed that PSNI officers are on their way.
The video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times online.
In the footage, Gallagher becomes unsteady on his feet as the evidence is put to him, while he urges a family member with him to leave the scene.
He attempts to leave himself, telling those behind the citizens’ arrest that “you are not the police” and “you have no right to stop me”.
One of those in the group tells him that they “work in conjunction with the police”.
The details of the allegations put to Gallagher about messages he had sent to a child decoy are too graphic for publication.
The priest then takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and says he is going to make a call, before the paedophile hunters attempt to take it from him and he places it back in his pocket.
“You brought this on yourself sir, no one else,” he is told.
Members of the Justice Reborn team said while some had suggested the priest had faked becoming unwell during the video, they believe the enormity of what he had been faced with led to him becoming unsteady on his feet.
The founder of the group said: “I spoke to the security team after that video, and I know a lot of people thought he was faking that. But the two guys who had their arms linked with his, they had his full body weight.
“He suddenly realised that he had been caught. He knew that once they look at my phone, he knew what they were going to find.”
The decoy added: “His total demeanour was like everybody we encroach. They hate hearing the words that they have said. They ruin children’s lives, that’s the bottom line of it.”
At the conclusion of the live video, PSNI officers arrive and arrest Gallagher.
He was subsequently charged with one count of attempted sexual communication with a child on dates between April 2 and April 17 2025, but more than 100 further charges with as many as 60 victims were later identified by police.
“He’s been in Maghaberry for over a year now, I hate to think how many more could have been affected if he wasn’t caught, it scares me,” the decoy said.
While police officially say that vigilante groups such as Justice Reborn slow down police investigations and even “prevent criminal justice outcomes”, the group’s founder says it “works in conjunction with” the PSNI, who she says are “grateful” for their cooperation.
“They will never come on to the news and say they support us,” she says.
“But whenever we are with them, they are grateful because we are handing them over the paedophile and concrete evidence that is chargeable along with him.
“The police don’t have the staff and resources to put time into doing stuff like this.
“Us as a group of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, we give up a bit of our time and do it for the kids.
“It would be great if we could intertwine with the police and work closer with them.”
While the predator priest is now behind bars and likely to face a significant prison sentence in December, questions have now turned to what the Catholic church knew about Gallagher before his arrest in April 2025.
It has since been revealed that the Derry diocese had questioned Gallagher about separate allegations three weeks prior to his arrest.
Bishop of Derry, Michael Router, has stated an adult made a complaint against Gallagher, who was “advised to go to the police”.
Bishop Router subsequently told the Ulster Herald newspaper that the diocese “had no knowledge of, and had received no suspicions, concerns or allegations about him in relation to children”.
He said his predecessor had “brought in” Gallagher, who was “talked to and put on notice”.
“It wasn’t an illegal act, as such. It was simply a complaint about conduct,” he said.
Bishop Router has said he is petitioning the Vatican to submit the case directly to the Pope, with a recommendation that Gallagher be immediately dismissed from the priesthood.
He said the events of the past eighteen months have caused “immense distress to victims and survivors of abuse, parishioners, families, clergy and the wider community”, and directed anyone with concerns or further information to contact the authorities or the diocese’s safeguarding team.
Gallagher was ordained as a priest in 1994 and worked across several parishes across Co Derry, Co Tyrone and Co Donegal.
He also spent five years working as a missionary in the Central American country of Belize. The Diocese of Derry set up a mission in the far-flung country in 1998, which Gallagher and another priest were sent to establish.
Chillingly, Gallagher told a local newspaper on his return to Ireland in 2003 in the aftermath of child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic church that the “poison” had been removed from the church.
“Some people say that to the positive people rallied around, but also there’s obviously the negative, the droves that have stayed away (from the church),” he told the paper.
“I think that will be the biggest change. We’ve been through all that, it’s behind us and the poison has been squeezed out of the system.”
The representatives for Justice Reborn expressed concern that there may be more victims of the predator priest and appealed for anyone with information to come forward.
“We like to think for every paedophile we catch, that’s three real kids saved, but in his case we have given a voice to over 60 victims and there could be more,” the founder of Justice Reborn says.
“He has been a priest from a young age and has had access to children practically all his life.”