A second woman came forward saying she had an affair with the late Eamonn Casey, in a disclosure casting further questions over the life and legacy of the disgraced former bishop.
The woman, now deceased, told Irish Times journalist Patsy McGarry of the liaison four decades after she and the then Fr Casey had a relationship in London in the 1960s. He was a priest in the city at the time, working with Irish emigrants, before returning to Ireland in 1969.
“What upset her most, then, was that when she met him in more recent years he didn’t remember her,” McGarry writes in Well, Holy God, his new memoir reporting on the fall of the Catholic Church as religious affairs correspondent.
“As it happened, I knew her. She was a very successful career woman, whom I admired as a person and had met a couple of times with a mutual friend.”
McGarry saw her approach to him, which she said was known to a senior cleric, as a convoluted attempt to thwart Casey’s return to public ministry in Ireland.
Casey resigned abruptly as bishop of Galway in 1992 when it was revealed he secretly fathered a child after an affair with Annie Murphy, an American divorcee and a distant cousin. Their son Peter Murphy was born in 1974.
After fleeing to Ecuador and then serving as a hospital chaplain in England, he was retired to a rural part of Co Galway in 2006.
The previous year he was removed from public ministry when his adult niece Patricia Donovan complained he sexually abused her as a child. Ms Donovan spoke publicly about her allegations for the first time in a TV documentary last month, saying her uncle raped her when she was five years old.
Casey always denied any abuse. But recent disclosures about the extent and seriousness of the claims against him raised new questions over the church’s response. In addition to Ms Donovan, three other people independently accused him of abuse.
Although the Vatican removed Casey from public ministry, it neither expelled him nor exonerated him of abuse. He was interviewed by gardaí but never charged. He received a stately church funeral in 2017 with 11 bishops and scores of priests attending.
Casey’s affair with Ms Murphy was the first big scandal to rock the church, before a tidal wave of abuse cases and cover-ups shattered clerical authority.
McGarry tells how the woman in the London affair approached him after Casey’s retirement to Co Galway when the former bishop was already in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. They spoke off the record, meaning McGarry was not then at liberty to report the conversation.
Convent-educated in Ireland before going to London as a young woman, she was in her late teens and early 20s when the relationship began with Casey. He was in his late 30s and early 40s.
The liaison ended when he left London to become bishop of Kerry and was not resumed, although they remained in infrequent contact.
At the time he met the woman, McGarry had been questioning why Casey was not allowed return to public ministry.
“I asked her whether the then bishop of Galway, Martin Drennan, was aware she was meeting me. She said he was,” he writes.
“I realised then I was being told, through this woman, that the bishops could not restore Eamonn Casey to full ministry because they had no idea what else might be revealed from his past life to come back and haunt them should they do so.
“Was I being manipulated by bishop Drennan through this woman? Yes. Was he justified in trying to do so? Probably. It was indeed believable that no one could know what else might be discovered from bishop Casey’s life.”
Bishop Drennan died in 2022.
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