Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Ireland · 1994

Ireland: Brendan Smyth — twelve years on seventy-four counts, and the case that broke the Irish scandal

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

priest of the Norbertine Order, moved repeatedly between parishes and jurisdictions

Organization

Norbertine Order

Spiritual nexus

Children across two jurisdictions reached through a priesthood that kept relocating him rather than stopping him.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 1994-01-01 · guilty plea and sentence; died in prison

    Irish courts. Fr Brendan Smyth pleaded guilty in 1994 to seventy-four counts of child abuse committed over decades and was sentenced to twelve years. He died in prison. The delay in extraditing him from Ireland to Northern Ireland precipitated the collapse of the Irish government in 1994.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • decades of transfers between Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United States that renewed his access to children

Primary record

Sources

official commission finding commission conviction record The Cloyne Report (Ireland, 2011), via the Internet Archive.

Commission report recording the conviction, counts and sentence.

Related record

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