The South Eastern Health Board (SEHB) was told of multiple instances of “inappropriate behaviour” by convicted paedophile Bill Kenneally almost 30 years before the former sports coach was convicted of abusing boys in 2015, a commission of investigation has heard.
Brian Walker (52) told the commission of being sent for counselling after he told his mother and a teacher in school of getting lifts home from Kenneally, during which the latter made inappropriate suggestions to him and threatened him with violence if he told anyone.
The teacher he told, Tom Meehan, was also a school counsellor, Mr Walker told the commission. After he disclosed what was happening “I thought that would be the end of everything”.
However, in subsequent years he saw other young teenage boys in Kenneally’s car. “Bill Kenneally simply moved on... I saw him driving around town with other boys from the basketball club.”
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He said Kenneally had given him a lift home on a number of occasions during which he “asked me questions he shouldn’t have asked a fella of that age”. He said he was never abused but was “being groomed”.
Mr Walker said at one stage he raised the topic of Kenneally with another teenager who was a good friend.
“He got upset and he never spoke to me again,” Mr Walker said. “I probably wouldn’t even recognise him now.”
The commission is investigating the response of State and other agencies to allegations against Kenneally, who pleaded guilty in late 2015 and again in 2022 to multiple cases of child sex abuse in Waterford. He is currently in jail for the abuse of 15 children between 1979 and 1990.
The witness said he was given lifts home by Kenneally in the mid-1980s when he was in his mid-teens. He said Kenneally was giving money and alcohol to teenage boys and would offer them lifts in his car.
Ercus Stewart SC, for the commission, read from a note from Dr Geraldine Nolan contained in a SEHB file in relation to her seeing Mr Walker, his friend Kevin Keating, and other teenage boys concerning their allegations about Kenneally.
There was “a question of money changing hands” and the boys being told by Kenneally that they would be “hurt or killed” if they told anyone, the doctor’s note recorded the boys as saying.
Dr Nolan recorded that the boys had made allegations “certainly of inappropriate behaviour” but there were “no allegations of specific sexual activity”. Kenneally was a “person of trust” who would need to be “monitored closely”, said the note, which was circulated.
Mr Walker said Kevin Keating’s mother had warned others about Kenneally at the time. He also said that his mother had told him last year that Mrs Keating was offered money by the Kenneallys to stop raising the matter.
Another witness, Waterford businessman Tom Murphy (74), said the Kenneallys were a very powerful family in the city. They had a number of pubs and ran their own bus service for many years alongside the service run by CIÉ. They were also prominent in Fianna Fáil, with men from three generations of the family having served as TDs.
He said it was his belief Chief Supt Seán Cashman was promoted to that position with the support of Fianna Fáil and the Kenneallys, because of how he handled the Bill Kenneally case. That was how the late garda “got his stripes”, the commission of investigation was told.
Mr Murphy said he complained at one stage about the failure to do something about Bill Kenneally and was told by Mr Cashman, whom he knew very well, that Kenneally had been brought into the garda station on one occasion and “left here a chastened boy”.
Responding to Barra McCrory SC, for some of Kenneally’s victims, including Barry Murphy, Mr Murphy agreed it might be the case that he had gone to the garda station after being contacted in the late 1980s by the mother of another of Kenneally’s victims, and warned about Kenneally.
He said he had not at that stage suspected that his son, Barry, had been one of Kenneally’s victims.
He said that in the mid-1980s he had twice over a short space of time seen groups of teenagers getting into Kenneally’s car. “It didn’t sit right with me,” he said.
Mr Murphy said he contacted the then head of Ernst & Young in Waterford, Bill Halley, about it because Kenneally worked there at the time. He never got a response, the witness said.
The chairman of the commission, Mr Justice Michael White, said he believed it was nearing the end of hearing evidence from witnesses.
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