A ROW involving two priests at Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, Dublin, ended in court yesterday with the public reading of an apology from one of them.
Ciarán Dalton, a former hospital chaplain, now a lay counsellor, Waterville, Blanchardstown, had claimed in the Circuit Civil Court that head chaplain Fr Martin Geraghty had slandered him.
Mr Dalton had alleged that Fr Geraghty had told a lay chaplain that money was missing from a Mass collection fund which helped priests and that Mr Dalton had taken it.
Fr Geraghty, Phibsboro, Dublin, had denied he made such a statement or had spoken in such terms about Mr Dalton or that he had ever bad-mouthed him.
The case had been almost fully heard over three days in July before Judge Joseph Mathews when the judge dramatically had to pull out of it when Mr Dalton’s barrister John Ferry questioned a number of “developments”.
He said a senior lawyer, Patrick Long SC (85), had shaken hands and spoken with Fr Geraghty in court and had lunched with a witness in the case after having met the judge briefly in his chambers.
Judge Mathews said that while no suggestion of impropriety on the part of the court had been made by Mr Ferry, he had no alternative but to withdraw.
When the case came up for retrial before Judge Jacqueline Linnane yesterday, Siobhán Phelan, for Fr Geraghty, told the court it had settled and could be struck out on her reading of an apology on behalf of Fr Geraghty.
Fr Geraghty regretted that Mr Dalton had felt it necessary to issue proceedings against him.
Mr Dalton had applied €10,204 from the chaplaincy fund for study-in-service training in Trinity College. This had been on the basis that Mr Dalton would apply to the HSE for course funding and would repay the fund with the money received from the HSE.
Fr Geraghty said that when no money had been forthcoming from the HSE, his understanding had been that it should in any event be repaid and, when this was not done, he had believed it his duty to inquire into the matter.
“In so doing I wish to assure you that I acted at all times in good faith, having regard to my obligations as head chaplain in the hospital,” Fr Geraghty said in his apology. “I particularly wish to assure you that in no way did I intend to impugn your honesty or good name and I accept now that I was mistaken in my understanding that the money should be repaid regardless.”
On behalf of Mr Dalton it had been stated the money had been paid to Trinity and vouched for.