Former Fianna Fáil TD and senator Dr Donie Ormonde has contradicted evidence given to the commission of inquiry examining child abuse by sports coach Bill Kenneally by the former RTÉ journalist Damien Tiernan.
Dr Ormonde said it was not true that Monsignor John Shine, who was Kenneally’s uncle, had asked him to keep certain matters out of the public.
Kenneally is serving a total of almost 19 years in prison for the abuse of 15 young boys in Waterford between 1979 and 1990.
In 2023, he was jailed for four-and-a-half years for abusing five boys.
That sentence will begin after he is finished serving a previous sentence of 14 years and two months for the abuse of ten other boys.
At the hearing this morning it was put to Dr Ormonde that Mr Tiernan’s evidence suggested that Dr Ormonde told him, or that it was discussed, or he knew about contacts with Monsignor Shine, to which Dr Ormonde said, “I knew nothing about that.”
Dr Ormonde said the only conversation he ever had with the monsignor was when he asked him to secure a bed for his unmarried sister in a nursing home which Dr Ormonde was on the board of in Tramore, Co Waterford.
He said that during the phone call, Monsignor Shine brought up a recent Irish Times report about Kenneally, to which Dr Ormonde replied, “I’d rather not go there.”
Dr Ormonde denied that he had arranged to meet Mr Tiernan in a hotel carpark, but said rather that he bumped into him by chance.
Dr Ormonde also told the commission of inquiry that he was never made aware of any allegations or complaints against Kenneally until they appeared in media reports.
Asked several times if he had spoken to Kenneally’s mother Mrs Kenneally, also known as Marie Shine, Dr Ormonde said he had never spoken to her in his life.
