Smyth abuse victim backs calls for Brady to resign

A VICTIM of paedophile Brendan Smyth has backed calls for Cardinal Seán Brady to resign over revelations that he knew about the priest’s abuse of children for almost 20 years before Smyth was arrested.

Bernice Donoghue said it stretched credibility that Cardinal Brady could have taken part in a Church inquiry which established Smyth was an abuser but had not subsequently pushed his superiors to ensure the priest had no further access to children.

“I find it absolutely unbelievable that he could wipe this from his mind and carry on regardless,” Ms Donoghue told RTÉ’s Pat Kenny.

“A paedophile is somebody who is a very, very sick individual and needs help but the men who protected the paedophiles are your ordinary everyday person like you and me and they chose to protect a paedophile over the protection of children. This whole culture of obedience bred infantilism in priests so the very idea that he would step up to the mark was unthinkable in those times but that was then and this is now. It’s time that people took responsibility. He might be an excellent bishop for all I know. He might be a very good man but what he did was negligent and it caused further children to be damaged.”

Ms Donoghue, from Dublin, was abused between 1969 and 1973 — two years before the Church inquiry in which Cardinal Brady questioned a number of Smyth’s victims.

The priest, who was then attached to Kilnacrott Abbey in Co Cavan, first abused Ms Donoghue and one of her sisters when they were on summer holidays at their mother’s home place near Mount Nugent.

“We would go to Lough Sheelin to swim and he appeared one day with sweets and treats and got to know all the children. That was his way — to come down and play with the children,” she said. Back in Dublin he turned up at the girls’ Dominican primary school and took them out of class to abuse them in the nuns’ parlour. He also visited the girls’ home and took them to the cinema and on other outings — all to give him the opportunity to abuse.

Eventually, Ms Donoghue’s sister told their mother they didn’t like the way the priest kissed them but their unsuspecting mother thought the children simply didn’t like this “ugly man” and she let them opt out of further outings without probing more deeply.

Following a mental breakdown in 1991, Ms Donoghue decided to go the gardaí and hers was one of the cases that led to Smyth being convicted and jailed in 1997. She later sued Smyth’s religious order, the Norbertines, and the Dominican Sisters but found the process so awful that she eventually accepted a paltry £15,000 settlement.

Throughout all the correspondence with the religious, they had continued to refer to Smyth as the “alleged abuser” even though he had been convicted.

“They were so hard and nasty,” she said.

When she refused to accept the final piece of correspondence, the letter of settlement, because it used the same term, they simply blacked out the “alleged” and sent the same letter back to her.