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Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole

Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole wrote a number of articles about the fall of the government of Albert Reynolds in November 1994 following false allegations that Cardinal Cahal Daly had written to the Attorney General with a view to preventing the extradition of Father Brendan Smyth to Northern Ireland. It is clear that he realised that the claim (by Democratic Left TD Pat Rabbitte) was false but he supported it anyway. It demonstrated that Irish people were no longer in thrall to the Catholic Church!

In March 1996 he wrote in praise of RTE documentary "Dear Daughter" that included allegations that a Sister of Mercy had poured boiling water over a resident of Goldenbridge school and had beaten her so badly that she needed 100 stitches - in the Casualty Department of a hospital! (The reference to Casualty was presumably an attempt to explain why the hospital has no record of this amazing operation.)

In 1999 he was perhaps the only journalist to defend John Cooney's allegation in his biography of John Charles McQuaid, that the Archbishop had been a homosexual paedophile. All other journalists (and historians) - including those who otherwise praised the book - said that this claim was nonsense and that Cooney should have omitted it.

 

Rory Connor
September 2011

 

"Scenes from the Birth of a New Morality" - O'Toole and the Fall of the Reynolds Governmnet in 1994

Fintan O'Toole and the Fall of the Reynolds Government (2)

Fintan O'Toole and the Fall of the Reynolds Government (3)

Fintan O'Toole, Christine Buckley and "Dear Daughter" (1996)

Goldenbridge and Fintan O'Toole (1996)

In Defence of John Cooney's Allegations re Archbishop McQuaid (1999)

O'Toole and the Church's "Special Contempt" for Children of Unmarried Mothers (1999)

Fintan O'Toole vs Dr. William Coulson and Fr. Brian Gogan - May/June 1999