Limerick story features on The New York Times

LIMERICK made the headlines of The New York Times last week, as reporter Dan Barry detailed former Limerick Leader reporter Anne Sheridan’s journey to uncovering Bishop Eamonn Casey’s “dark secrets”.

Ms Sheridan, now news editor at the Irish Daily Mail, said: “To see a story that I have cared about for more than eight years, and one that began on the front page of the Leader, appear last week on the front page of The New York Times is a great honour.”

She added: “I’m delighted the story has now reached a much wider audience through the RTE documentary, which has garnered some 700,000 viewers to date, and now also to potentially millions of readers worldwide through The New York Times.

“I have been a fan of Dan Barry’s work for many years and I was glad that a writer of his calibre, and that someone who pays such attention and care to the subject matter, took such an interest in it.”

Ms Sheridan began investigating the now-international story in the Limerick Leader back in 2016: “When I first started working on this story, I knew it was important and potentially very significant.

“It took many years of work and building a lot of trust in various contacts for a fuller picture of the allegations to emerge. I’m still conscious the full extent of these may not be in the public domain,” she continued.

“I have been conscious for quite some time that there are layers of hurt in this story. There is the pain felt by Bishop Casey’s alleged victims, those who have come forward and those who may never feel able to do so; there is the hurt caused to his own surviving relatives; the trauma left to his son Peter Murphy and his mother Annie; and there are his parishioners and lay faithful across Ireland and beyond, as well as his fellow clerics," she added.

Bishop Casey was formally removed from ministry in 2007, after the church received multiple allegations from 2001 onwards, when the first known complaint was made.

The allegations span four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, and cover all three dioceses where he served, including the Limerick Diocese in the 1960s.

The Limerick Diocese received three separate allegations of childhood sexual abuse against Bishop Casey, in 2001, 2005 and 2014.

“The story of the first known High Court case pending against Bishop Casey was broken by the Limerick Leader, but the story was still in its infancy by the time I left the paper in 2017,” she explained, adding that the contacts she had built up and the training she had received from news editor Eugene Phelan during her time with the paper "would later help massively".

Ms Sheridan continued to work on the story while working at the Irish Mail on Sunday, where the next big step in the story arrived in the form of a phone call from Patricia Donovan, Bishop Casey’s niece.

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Ms Donovan had read the first story in the saga, written for the Limerick Leader, and offered to share her story with Ms Sheridan, and consequently, the world.

Thus began the next stage of Ms Sheridan’s coverage of the story, beginning in the Irish Mail on Sunday, and continuing in the RTE documentary.

“When we went to print at the Irish Mail on Sunday in March 2019, after about nine months of work, I think I, and my editors, Conor O’Donnell and Robert Cox, were satisfied that we could bring the story as far as we possibly could at that point in time. It ran on the front page and across six pages inside,” Ms Sheridan explained.

“It was the first time Bishop Casey’s niece, Patricia Donovan, agreed to tell her story to the public, and the first time it was revealed that there were multiple allegations against him, two resulting in substantial settlements.”

She insists that she could not have done it alone, explaining that “without the trust, backing and support of editors such as Mr Phelan, Mr O’Donnell and Mr Cox, we may not be reading or aware of this story now”.