Police who interviewed Brendan Smyth paint a picture of an arrogant, cold, sly and calculating man with a sharp memory who never admitted to an offence unless it was put to him.

He was fairly co-operative, say detectives, and he did not break down or show any hint of remorse.

Sentenced yesterday to 12 years in jail, he will be remembered as more than just a multiple and highly-recidivist paedophile whose crimes against children shattered many people's faith in his church.

For in 1994, indirectly via his bungled extradition case, Brendan Smyth was instrumental in the fall of the Fianna Fail-Labour coalition.

His unchecked activities - and the inadequate way the Catholic Hierarchy handled the scandal - caused inestimable and probably irreversible damage and shame to the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Smyth has already served just under three years for 43 child abuse offences in the North. RUC sources say there are other victims whose abuse has been corroborated but who have refused to make statements.

Smyth has received assurances from the RUC and the Garda that he will not face further criminal prosecutions in either jurisdiction.

Court proceedings against him in this jurisdiction began last April following his release from Magilligan prison in Co Derry.

In a statement read out to the court last week by his counsel, Ms Gemma Loughran, Smyth apologised publicly for his "sins against God, offences against individual persons and laws of the State".

But the victims and investigating officers do not believe that this act of contrition was his idea, despite his completion of a course for sexual offenders while in prison.

"Nothing within him would make him believe that he has done wrong. He doesn't feel any remorse and he's not sorry. That's what makes paedophiles dangerous," said an RUC source.

Smyth has been professionally diagnosed as suffering from a virtually incurable psychiatric disorder called "fixated paedophilia."

This means that he wants to engage in sexual relationships with children rather than adults. His victims were mostly aged between six and 12.

HE HAS repeatedly displayed the symptoms of his condition. One officer involved in his case recalls asking him his motives for abusing an eight-year-old girl. "Well, she didn't try to stop me," Smyth replied.

"This was an eight-year-old girl, she would have been frightened," said the officer.

"If she didn't want me to do this I wouldn't have done it."

Smyth once explained to this officer how touching a victim's body and having them touch his penis were only venial sins.

"A mortal sin for him was having sexual intercourse and he felt that only people who committed mortal sins could go to jail or offend God, so from the moral point of view he didn't think he was doing any wrong," said the source.

Several detectives who have questioned Smyth describe him as reasonably intelligent but emotionally "child-like".

Smyth has told investigating officers that he has suffered from long-term impotence. While men with this condition cannot get an erection, they can ejaculate. In court last week, one victim told of how he had ejaculated over her school uniform and stained it.

One investigating officer says Smyth may be claiming he is impotent to appear less harmful.

Brendan John Gerard Smyth was born in Belfast on June 6th, 1927. He was brought up in a terraced house off the Falls Road and attended the local Christian Brothers School before joining the Norbertine Order in 1945 at the age of 18.

He spent his novitiate at Holy Trinity Abbey in Kilnacrott, Ballyjamesduff, Co Cavan, the order's only abbey in Ireland.

He was ordained in 1951 after two years studying in Rome, where he gained a degree in theology at the Gregorian University. From then until 1983, he spent short periods in Scotland, Wales and America, returning at intervals to Kilnacrott.

From 1983 onwards he had no formal ministry but did summer work in parishes and visited the sick in hospitals around the State.

He first came to the attention of the RUC in 1990, and in 1991 was arrested and released on bail. For the next three years, he persistently evaded the RUC, despite repeated phone calls for him to Kilnacrott by the investigating officer. The RUC issued an extradition warrant for him in April 1993.

During this period when he was wanted in the North, his abuse of children continued.

In January 1994, following pressure from the Church, Smyth turned himself over to the RUC. He has served two prison terms in the North.

It was from Kilnacrott Abbey that the young and energetic priest started molesting children and embarked on his double life. He organised activities which would create a pool of children for him to prey on.

These included setting up a choir, organising catechism classes and altar boy training sessions and, having established the trust of parents, taking the children on trips.

He would befriend the children's parents, who were honoured that a priest was calling to their homes. As the court heard last week, he continued to use such techniques for attracting his young prey wherever he went.

While attached to Kilnacrott Smyth seemed to be somewhat his own boss, able to travel regularly by car back to west Belfast to his coterie of victims.

His technique of abuse began by tickling the children, playing childish games with them and bouncing them on his knee in front of their parents. Only when he was alone with the children did he kiss them and force his tongue in their mouths or slip his hands down the back of their pants or up their skirts to feel their genitals.

One 12-year-old male victim was forced to masturbate Smyth in a boathouse. Smyth told him he had to do it for God. When he didn't do it fast enough, Smyth slapped him on the wrist and said God wouldn't like him.

A woman, whom he touched in the genital area on a car trip to Knock, had later hesitated in ordering food at a restaurant. He threatened her that if she didn't choose something he would "do the same thing" to her on the way back.

Another woman spoke of how she would wait in terror for his visits to her midlands boarding school when he would call her out of class and abuse her in the parlour. She spoke also of her double humiliation when she was rebuked once by a nun in front of her class for having a uniform stained by his semen.

Smyth molested his victims in his car, and even in their homes while their parents were in other rooms. Given the venerated status priests enjoyed until recent years, no suspicion ever fell on him.

The former Abbot of Holy Trinity Abbey, Father Kevin Smith, has stated he believes Smyth's problem with children surfaced shortly after he began his religious life.

He told reporter Chris Moore, whose 1994 UTV documentary Suffer Little Children broke the Smyth scandal, that in the early years frequent reassignment was often the way Church authorities handled priest paedophiles.

In a letter to Moore in September 1994, he wrote: "Father Smyth was reassigned every few years or so in an effort to keep him from forming attachments to families and their children. We now see how inadequate this approach actually was." From 1968 to 1993, Smyth was referred by his order for treatment in Belfast, England and Dublin. A good deal of the abuse for which he was sentenced yesterday was committed during this period.

IN A statement of apology issued by Holy Trinity Abbey yesterday, it said that it was "only as the years went on that we became aware not only of the nature and extent of his compulsion, but also of his resistance to treatment which was prescribed to him."

There is evidence that Smyth used his pastoral visits abroad as new opportunities for abuse. In Langdon, North Dakota, where he served for two years in the early 1980s, he set up "server training sessions" for altar boys which he held in the parish rectory. He always had lots of servers at Mass.

Although there are reports of some six boys being abused by him during his stay in Langdon, only one initiated a civil suit. This was settled, without admission of liability, for a six-figure sum from the church's insurance company, according to the man's lawyer, Lee Hamilton.

The man also received a sum of around $20,000 from Smyth personally to help pay for counselling, according to Father Dale Kinzler, the former pastor of St Alphonsus Church in Langdon.

Father Kinzler says Smyth appeared to be "a normal, glib Irishman, relatively witty, relatively good-humoured and quite an active conversationalist. Not what you would call a retiring individual."

Prison sources said Smyth has adapted well to prison life which, in its regimentation, resembles religious life. In Magilligan he had a strict daily routine of religious and secular reading, praying, walking and saying a daily Mass.

While there, he received donations from well-wishers worldwide totalling several thousand pounds, according to one source.

But other prisoners have meted out rough justice to Smyth. He has been beaten several times in Magilligan and it has been reported that other prisoners have urinated on his bed, and thrown excrement at him.

Smyth will serve out his final prison term surrounded by some 80 other sex offenders in the Curragh, a recently converted civilian prison.