Staff at the National Rehabilitation Hospital are devastated that self-confessed child abuser Father Noel Reynolds was chaplain there for nearly a year without them knowing his background.
This was the reaction of the director of nursing, Ms Eilish Macklin, who said: "Its a small hospital here and we all work as a team. All the staff here are more than a little devastated by what has happened, that somebody like that could be in our midst without us knowing."
The hospital has a children's ward where there are always approximately six in-patients under the age of 16. Ms Macklin said that in all these appointments a letter would come from the auxiliary bishop or bishop's office in Dublin stating that the appointment had been made.
"That's the format and it was the same in this case. We got the letter in the usual way. Nobody told us anything else," Ms Macklin said. She told The Irish Times that the first she heard about the priest's background was last week when a researcher from RTÉ's Prime Time programme contacted her about him.
The researcher was preparing for Wednesday's night's special programme on clerical sex abuse in the Dublin archdiocese. It reported that in 1996, while Father Reynolds. who died earlier this year, was parish priest of Glendalough, some parents complained to Archbishop's House that they had serious concerns about his behaviour towards their children but nothing happened.
Eighteen months later, parents threatened to go public unless something was done. At the same time in 1995 another priest in Rathnew said he also reported concerns about Father Reynolds.
The programme stated that the then Archbishop Connell immediately moved him, assigning him as chaplain to the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dún Laoghaire.
Father Reynolds was at the hospital from July 1997 to May 1998. Three years ago, shortly after he left the hospital, he admitted abusing more than 100 children in eight parishes in Dublin.
Yesterday, Ms Macklin said they knew nothing about the parents' concerns and they heard nothing about the later admission of child abuse. "We knew nothing about it. We're absolutely devastated," she said.
Yesterday, a spokesman for Cardinal Desmond Connell confirmed on RTÉ that concern had been expressed about the behaviour of the late Father Reynolds towards children before his appointment as chaplain to the hospital.
However, the spokesman said the priest was sent for assessment and that assessment concluded there was no evidence of child sexual abuse.
When the diocese received the first complaint of child sexual abuse against Father Reynolds, he was immediately removed from the hospital in May 1998, the spokesman said.