Bill Kenneally tells inquiry he had no contact with gardaí for 25 years after admitting abuse of boys

Bill Kenneally, a former basketball coach, is currently serving a 19-year sentence for the indecent assault of 15 boys between 1979 and 1990.

Convicted paedophile Bill Kenneally has said he had no contact with gardaí for 25 years after admitting to two Waterford gardaí that he had been abusing boys and restraining them with handcuffs.

Appearing on Tuesday at the commission of investigation into how his case was handled in the 1980s, 73-year-old Kenneally admitted that at least six boys were mentioned as having been abused by him at an interview with Superintendent Sean Cashman and Inspector PJ Hayes on December 30, 1987.

Kenneally, a former basketball coach, is currently serving a 19-year sentence for the indecent assault of 15 boys in Waterford between the years 1979 and 1990.

Kenneally said he had attended that interview after his uncle, TD Billy Kenneally, told him that the gardaí wanted to speak to him

He accepted that he had said upon attending that he was “glad” to be at the station, as he needed help to treat what he described as an “addiction”.

He said he told the two gardaí "what I was doing”, and that he had “mentioned handcuffs and touching genitalia” but said that he also told the gardaí that no sodomy had taken place, adding that the gardaí “seemed comfortable” with that.

He said the gardaí had asked him where he had gotten the handcuffs, and that he was of the opinion that he had purchased them in a sex shop.

Kennelly agreed with counsel for his victims Barra McGrory that he had used handcuffs as a form of sexual gratification, but that “if anyone said ‘stop’ or ‘no’ then I would stop”.

Asked if the handcuffs had been used as a “form of imprisonment”, Kennelly replied “they’ve become very popular in sexual activity since”. He added that there had been “no resistance” from his victims.

He agreed that at least six boys’ names were brought up in the 1987 interview, most of them raised by the gardaí interviewing him.

Following that 90-minute interview, Kenneally said he was instructed not to contact the boys again and to seek out psychiatric help. He said he subsequently had several sessions with psychologist Dr Michael Kelleher where he had asked him “what can you do to help me?”.

Kennelly said that following the Garda interview, his last contact with any member of the gardaí was with his friend Sean Barry, who had spoken to him on the street in 1988.

From that point until December 2012 he had heard nothing further from the gardaí.

He agreed that he had been “afraid” of attending the interview, and had considered prosecution a possibility.

He said, however, that child abuse “wouldn’t have been regarded one quarter as serious then”, and said that he would have expected a sentence of “possibly two years” had he been convicted.

Kennelly stressed that the age of consent for sexual activity at the time had been 15. 

He said that he had been the victim of abuse himself at the age of 15 for several months by a person not connected with his family.