Priest sent abroad was ‘hard to get on with’

The Irish priest believed to be one of Australia’s worst clerical child sex offenders was sent there from an Irish order because he was “a bit hard to get on with in ordinary life”, it has emerged.

Correspondence between a senior Redemptorist in Limerick and a bishop in New South Wales has been submitted to a special commission of inquiry into child sex abuse in the Church there.

The documentation, reported in The Australian newspaper, shows the Limerick provincial (head of the order) John Treacy wrote to the bishop of Maitland in 1949 asking if he would “take one of our students”, Denis McAlinden.