‘Priest assaulted me when I was 13’

A 45-year-old woman has told the High Court a priest kissed her and touched her breast when she was a teenager in 1983.

Dolores Atwood said she first met Richard Burke, a member of the Kiltegan Fathers order, after Mass at a Catholic church in Nigeria in 1982 and enjoyed conversations with him.

When she became ill with typhoid fever in 1983, at the age of 13, she was “surprised” when he visited her in hospital. While he was there, the light went off and he kissed her, touched her breast, and was “touching me inappropriately”.