Convicted paedophile Bill Kenneally made himself out to be the victim during his appearance this week at the Hickson Commission of Investigation, which is investigating the response of the State and other bodies to his crimes.
The former Co Waterford basketball coach sat slouchedat the front of the room in the Dublin Dispute Resolution Centre with a thick folder in front of him. He drew on the material inside to enunciate his own rights, but not his responsibilities to his many victims.
There were no expressions of remorse or regret from the 73-year-old, who is serving an 18-year prison sentence for abuse he carried out on boys between the 1970s and 1990s. In 2016 he was sentenced to 14 years in jail and then to a further 4½ years in 2023. He is not due to be released before 2030.
Kenneally, a member of a well-known Fianna Fáil family, said he did not hear from gardaí for 25 years despite admitting to them in 1987 that he had indecently assaulted a number of boys. He claimed his crimes would not have been viewed as “one quarter” as serious in the late 1980s as they are now.
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He said he had the chance to become a Waterford city councillor, and even mayor, in the early 1990s, but decided not to because “I knew I had a skeleton in the cupboard”.
At least six named victims of Kenneally attended the commission this week to hear his testimony, and the same number of unnamed victims. The men were referred to using the letter A with a number – such as A1 and A5 – but those present knew clearly when reference was being made to them.
The paedophile’s words drew frequent gasps of anger and exasperation from his victims, whose lives he refused to accept he had ruined. Kenneally cast doubt on their recollections frequently.
It was Jason Clancy in December 2012 who went to gardaí and rolled the first stone that created the avalanche that led to his abuser getting a record sentence for such crimes in Ireland.
Mr Clancy’s persistence, and that of other victims, led to the setting up in 2018 of the commission, which is investigating how An Garda Síochána, State agencies, Basketball Ireland and the Catholic Church handled the allegations made against Kenneally.
Previously Kenneally had been a distant figure on the stand in a big courtroom. This week, he was sitting just metres from the people he had abused.
“You are really looking at evil up close,” Mr Clancy said of Kenneally’s appearance at the commission.
“He’s an absolute disgrace. He was so disrespectful to us. He came in to the inquiry to air his issues that he has in relation to his civil rights and his constitutional rights and so forth.”
It was particularly galling, Mr Clancy said, to hear Kenneally suggest that his abuse of young boys was somehow consensual.
“He hates me. He sees me as the person who started off all this. I knew he would say something negative about me,” Mr Clancy added. “It was devastating to hear him say it was consensual. I ended up having to leave the room. I had to calm myself down. I came back in then. It was the lack of respect, the giggling, the laughing, the sneering, it was just repugnant.”
For Barry Murphy, Kenneally’s appearance brought back bad memories of when he was abused by him in 1986 and 1987.
“I came home and tried to watch something on television, but I was distracted and thoughts and memories kept coming back to me,” he said. “I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since the time of his appeal six years ago. It was a different setting, whereas on Tuesday he was sitting in the room 10ft away from me. I knew I had to sit through it and I wanted to sit through it.”
Mr Murphy said Kenneally made a “huge revelation” on Tuesday that he had not admitted before. He alleged that at the first meeting he had with gardaí, which took place on December 30th, 1987, he provided the names of six boys that he had abused.
“Nobody from the Garda ever shared that information,” he said. “That was a bombshell and that’s why we are being delayed for another day because the Garda barrister wants to speak to him [Kenneally] about that.”
[ Paedophile Bill Kenneally refuses to accept he ruined the lives of his victimsOpens in new window ]
Both victims are complimentary about the commission’s chairman, retired judge Michael White, who they said has understood their concerns throughout.
“The commission is doing a fantastic job. We have so much faith in the judge. He is so clued in to it,” said Mr Clancy. “There has to be reform. Kenneally went on the rampage for four decades in plain sight of the gardaí and of the authorities.”
Neither was the State response historic, he added. The gardaí did nothing in 2012 after being informed that Kenneally was a paedophile and were compelled to act only after Mr Clancy went public with his information.
“God forbid if something happened to your child,” he said. “They should be able to march into a Garda station, tell their story and it be acted on irrelevant as to who the perpetrator is. That is not the case now.”
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