It could happen to a bishop as prolific conman strikes again

It's a well-documented fact in this country that it can happen to a bishop. And in the case of the Ireland's most prolific conman, it's happened again.

The auxiliary bishop of Dublin, Dr Fiachra O Ceallaigh, yesterday joined the growing list of people ringing RTE's Liveline programme to describe how they have been duped over the years by a smooth-talking Mayo man.

Under a variety of pseudonyms and posing as anything from a doctor to an engineer to a garda, the man has cut a swathe across Ireland for two decades, charming a wide range of people - often vulnerable women - out of their money.

But yesterday Dr O Ceallaigh revealed that he too had fallen foul of the silver-tongued stranger, when he gave him a lift some years ago while driving west.

The bishop told Liveline presenter Joe Duffy that his guest had posed as a doctor from San Diego on that occasion. But he had later hit the bishop for money on a number of occasions, before Dr O Ceallaigh became suspicious and, in his own words, told the conman to "buzz off".

Since then, the man has discovered another profitable past-time: gaining accommodation in religious houses by posing as a relative of the bishop. Short, fat and jolly, by everyone's account, the conman has a particular talent for duping women. In one of the worst cases, he defrauded a female bank worker in Northern Ireland of £11,500, by getting her to cash bad cheques. B&B owners are other regular victims, as are clothes shop owners; because his getaways often necessitate leaving his wardrobe behind.

A former prison officer now in his mid-40s, he has twice been convicted of fraud, in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. But from the accounts of Liveline listeners, he has been fully operational again since late 1998.

All his victims speak of his charm, but Joe Duffy says comparisons with television's favourite conman, Del-Boy, are unwarranted. "This guy has a dark side. When he was posing as a doctor in Swords, he visited a sick child in the night and prescribed Calpol. And there's also his tendency to pick on women who are at very low points in their life. He's no Del-Boy."