How Journalism Got Australia the Child-Abuse Royal Commission
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How journalism got Australia the child-abuse royal commission Joanne McCarthy and the Newcastle Morning Herald’s investigation of the Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse of children by clergy in the Hunter region of New South Wales was a decisive factor in Julia Gillard’s decision to appoint the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse. This is the story of how that journalism was done and how it galvanised other institutions, including police and politicians, to create a climate in which the clamour for a royal commission became irresistible. It also shows what is at stake if the current financial crisis afflicting the media cripples investigative reporting. By DENIS MULLER In 1995, police in the Hunter region of New South Wales investigated Vincent Gerard Ryan, a Catholic priest, for sex crimes against boys spanning 20 years. Brought to trial in 1996 and 1997, he pleaded guilty to multiple offences including sexual intercourse by anal and oral penetration and was sentenced to 16 years’ jail, with a minimum of 11. He ultimately served 14 years. In October 2016, he was given a further 15-month suspended sentence, having pleaded guilty to attempted homosexual intercourse with a male aged between 10 and 18, indecent assault on a male and gross indecency with a male under 18, in the mid-1980s at East Gresford, near Dungog. The Maitland-Newcastle diocesan office had become aware of his sexual predations in 1975 but continued to protect and promote him over those 20 years. The Newcastle Morning Herald covered his trials and in 1996 published a statement by Bishop Michael Malone, who had become Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle the previous year, in which he said that despite his conviction, Ryan would not be stripped of his priesthood. In 1999, a detective in Cessnock, also in the Hunter region, received a complaint by a woman concerning a sexual assault on her by another priest, Father Denis McAlinden. The Church moved him around to various parts of Australia and Papua-New Guinea and it was not until 2005 that the police finally found him in a Church-run aged-care home in Western Australia. He died a month later. In 2003 the then Detective Sergeant Peter Fox, of the New South Wales Police, charged Father James Patrick Fletcher with multiple counts of anal and oral sexual penetration of an 1 altar boy named Daniel Feenan. In 2004 Fletcher was convicted and in 2005 he was sentenced to between seven-and-a-half and ten years’ jail, where he died. The sentencing proceedings took place in the District Court at Gosford on the New South Wales Central Coast, south of Newcastle. The Newcastle Morning Herald assigned its Central Coast reporter, Joanne McCarthy, to cover the sentencing. She filed a brief routine report and returned to other duties. However, towards the end of 2007, McCarthy was asked by the Herald’s features editor to look into why enrolments at Catholic primary schools in the Hunter were dropping. McCarthy, who has a ready grasp of newsroom vernacular, pronounced the idea “as boring as bat shit”. However, she made a couple of phone calls, and in the second one the person on the other end said, “It might have something to do with the child sexual abuse stuff”. She reviewed the Herald’s coverage of the Ryan case and of various civil cases that had been brought against the Church by victims, and found it patchy. “We partly reported on them but I can’t say it was followed through in the way that maybe it should have been.” However, she also noted that some of the cases were being settled out of court and that therefore there had perhaps not been much material available to report on. She further observed that a columnist at the Herald, Geoff Courbet, had challenged the Church’s assertion that Ryan was a lone rogue priest, a challenge that had provoked strong blowback from Bishop Malone. Still pursuing the falling-enrolments story and the possible link with sexual abuse, McCarthy visited the website of Broken Rites, an advocacy group established in Melbourne to support victims. It also kept a public record of sexual crimes by Catholic clergy. There she saw what she described as a “funny comment” about the death of a Monsignor Patrick Cotter. On the website, Cotter, in his role as Vicar-General of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese during the 1970s, was said to have moved Ryan and McAlinden around, so covering up their crimes. McCarthy rang Bernard Barrett, who convenes Broken Rites, to explore this further. He referred her to a Newcastle lawyer, Kate Maher, and it was at this point that McCarthy cast off the school-enrolments story like an abandoned chrysalis: she was now in full pursuit of 2 the allegation that Monsignor Cotter had covered up for Ryan. Cotter had gone to his grave seven or eight weeks earlier, hailed as a holy man. Kate Maher invited her to inspect the files of the compensation cases she had handled. She told McCarthy that the matters were all settled and that she was sure the clients would be happy for someone to have a look at them. The files included letters that Cotter had written, proving that the diocesan hierarchy had known of the abuse, and this explained why the payouts to these victims had been much higher than would otherwise have been the case: amounts like $600,000 and in one case more than $3 million. And then, from a retired detective, McCarthy obtained a transcript of a police interview conducted with Cotter during an investigation that ended with a recommendation that he be charged. The Director of Public Prosecutions did not proceed, mainly because Cotter was by then aged 82 and near death. “At the bare minimum, one senior churchman with responsibility for handling the thing had known,” McCarthy said. She wrote a story that the Herald put on page one quoting another retired policeman, an assistant commissioner who had supervised the investigation, saying that it was justice denied to Ryan’s victims that Cotter had not been charged. This story was a watershed. “Suddenly I was just being inundated with calls that went beyond just Ryan. That was when I got a call from somebody I didn’t know and this person said to me, ‘You want to look at a priest by the name of McAlinden. You won’t need a first name’. Her informant is now dead. “He was in a senior position in the diocese. And his son was also a victim. It was John Feenan, Daniel Feenan’s father. John was doing all the compensation matters in the Ryan case. Even when Daniel disclosed to Pat, his mother, and John, they didn’t believe him straight up.” McCarthy believes that John Feenan tipped her off because he was “a decent man” and because his son had been a victim. “I think there was a lot of guilt. I think that was John’s way of maybe righting a few wrongs. There was John handling this cold and clinical compensation thing while his own son was falling apart. The fallout for that family has been 3 extraordinary. They’re all still close in a non-normal sort of way. When John died, there was a big funeral and all of the family were there.” And Daniel? “He had many suicide attempts but he is a strong individual. At a certain point he said, ‘I want to be named’, and then he came out with a very strong piece that was around the World Youth Day in 2008. We ran it on the front page.” World Youth Day and the attendant visit to Sydney of Pope Benedict XVI in July of that year marked a significant shift in the approach to the issue by McCarthy and the Herald. It was the point where, McCarthy says, their coverage broadened from an investigation into a campaign. By then, McCarthy had followed up John Feenan’s tip-off about McAlinden. “He was a completely opportunistic child sex offender: basically little girls between the ages of four and twelve. He went for families. Lots of sisters. There’s one family I think it’s either four or five daughters, all of them victims. He was a piece of work.” The year 2008 was also significant for the police. It was the year that Strike Force Georgiana, set up at the end of 2007 to pursue paedophile priests, started to gain some traction. The establishment of the strike force marked an overdue change in police attitudes. In late 2007, the sexual crimes squad in Sydney had received a terse phone call from inside the diocesan office of the Catholic Church in Newcastle. The caller was Helen Keevers. She had been appointed by Bishop Malone to clean out the Augean stables bequeathed to him by his predecessor, the late Bishop Leo Clarke, and Monsignor Cotter. Keevers, though not a Catholic, had been working for the Catholic welfare agency Centacare in Newcastle for the best part of 20 years when Malone appointed her to a new position as child protection officer. She established Zimmerman House, a place where victims could go for support. Although it was located in an old convent, by removing or painting over the religious icons Keevers contrived to create a non-religious atmosphere in which victims felt safe. It was there that she encouraged a victim of the late Father Peter Julian Brock to take his case to the police at Charlestown, who had been handling a lot of these matters.