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AT AN EMOTIONAL press conference in Dublin, metres from Leinster House, survivors of Bill Kenneally spoke of the painful, mixed feelings they have about the long-awaited report into their abuser.
The final report of the Commission of Investigation examining Kenneally’s “cruel and exploitative” sexual abuse and how authorities repeatedly failed to stop the predator was published this afternoon.
It highlights failures to act on reports of Kenneally’s abuse within a number of organisations – including the gardaí, the health system and local political circles within Waterford – and details the missed opportunities to expose his abuse long before he was eventually apprehended.
Several of his victims, many of whom are now in their 50s, gathered in Buswells Hotel this afternoon where they welcomed the report, as they recounted how their boyhoods were shattered by the accountant and sports coach.
Central to their demands this afternoon was for a State apology over the handling of the sex offender’s crimes. Included in this call are appeals for an apology from An Garda Síochána, the HSE Fianna Fáil and the Diocese of Wateford and Lismore.
Despite all the frustrations that remain with what victims faced by authorities, one man was blunt about how glad he was to have reached this endpoint with the commission.
“Today, for me, is an extremely happy day,” Kevin Keating said.
While he said that there are going to be a “lot more questions” to be answered, he added that he felt survivors had found “vindication” through the inquiry. “It’s a happy day,” he reiterated to reporters.
“The monster which is Bill Kenneally is in prison. He’s staying in prison,” Keating said.
Keating further highlighted how critical today was for the men in their room, some 15 years after they first contacted gardaí, but also for other survivors of sexual abuse.
“The massive one for me,” Keating added before taking a deep breath, is that it “gives kids another reason they can come forward.”
Kenneally, now in his 70s, is currently serving a sentence of 19 years for the abuse of 15 boys, following two separate prosecutions.
Several survivors made the point that the men and their families had endured a painstaking process that had taken a “heavy mental toll” for each person involved to get to this stage.
They also spoke of the “overriding” hurt they feel over a missed opportunity that gardaí had to stop Kenneally before he went on to abuse them and many others.
Colin Power, one of the victims who waived their anonymity following a prosecution of Kenneally in 2016, said that “lives were ruined” because of the lack of action.
Power pointed to what the inquiry found to have been “a missed opportunity” for gardaí act in 1985, after a 14-year-old boy walked into a garda station and reported he had been sexually assaulted by the former basketball coach.
“In 1985, if things were handled properly, he could have been stopped two years earlier than that, and also ultimately, that’s what happened here,” Power said.
Barry Murphy, another survivor of Kenneally’s abuse, told reporters today that the same fact had “kept me awake all night last night” after receiving the report on Monday from the Department of Justice.
We said it on our Zoom meeting last night. If our fellow victim had been taken seriously in 1985 we would not be sitting here, and our lives wouldn’t have been ruined for 30 years. And you know that has to hit home, and all our families have to live with it too.
Opening the press conference, a solicitor for a number of victims who are represented by law firm Phoenix Law, Diarmuid Brecknell said that the men present in the room were, as boys in Waterford in the 1980s, were “abused, abandoned and then forced to spend the best part of their lives fighting for a truth that should never have been buried”.
The solicitor added that the commission’s own words on critical figures involved in gardaí, the church and Fianna Fáil shared the same “failure to bring the matter into the public domain” and notify child protection bodies.
Brecknell summed up the new call from their campaign as he opened up today’s press conference:
“We are calling today on the government and all institutions named in this report, An Garda Síochána, the HSE, the Diocese of Waterford, the Fianna Fáil political party, to issue a full and public apology to these men, an apology for the abuse they suffered, and for the decades they were forced to fight for a truth that should never have been buried.”
Jason Clancy, whose report to gardaí in 2012 led to the first successful prosecution of Kenneally, told media that there is a “huge amount” that the various bodies should apologise for, as he took aim at Fianna Fáil.
Bill Kenneally was a member of a political dynasty in Waterford, who contested elections from the 1950s to 2011, and were likened in the inquiry to the Kennedys of the city’s politics.
In today’s report, retired High Court judge Michael White said that Brendan Kenneally, former TD for Fianna Fáil and a cousin to Bill, was told in 2001 of the serious and prolonged abuse of two boys.
However, he failed to inform state agencies of this and instead tried to refer his relative to a psychiatrist. By doing this, his response fell “substantially below the standards expected of an experienced TD” as he took no steps to report the matter to child
protection services, the report found.
On this, speaking today, Clancy said that the party “should be apologising for their role that they played” by way of the actions of the member of the Kenneally family.
“It is vindicating to know that we were right all along, and that we were let down by every institution that was there to protect us.”
Clancy praised White and legal representatives for “dragging the truth” out of government agencies at the inquiry over eight years.
However, he described the process of “reliving the sexual abuse” during the inquiry as “absolute torture” for him and others.
Darragh Mackin of Phoenix Law, which acted for eight victims said that the report confirms what the men had always known – that they were “failed by every limb of the state”.
“Today marks an end to this long and dark episode in the history of Ireland where for too long those limbs of the state adopted a ‘Hear no evil, Speak no evil’ mentality. Today marks an end to these victims’ isolation,” Mackin said.
His colleague Brecknell agreed with the inquiry’s finding that the actions of senior gardaí, who allowed to Kenneally walk free from Waterford Garda Station in 1987 despite his admission of abuse, was a dereliction of duty.
“A number of boys continued to be abused for years after this as a direct consequence of that decision,” Brecknell said.
“In fact, some of the most decrepit abuse occurred after this meeting. This is what dereliction of duty looks like in practice, and this is what it costs.”
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