Last week the death was announced of the former Bishop of Galway, who resigned in disgrace 25 years ago after it emerged that he was the father of a teenage boy. A colleague and friend recalls a complex man of great energy and charm

Two years after his sudden disapperance from Ireland following the revelation that he had fathered a son 17 years earlier and had paid maintenance to the child’s American mother out of diocesan funds, I went to visit Eamonn Casey in Ecuador. I turned up at his door on a Sunday morning as he was counting the Mass collection.

His living conditions in San Miguel de los Bancos were pitiful but he happily drove me all over his remote Andean parish in his dilapidated Volkswagen Beetle and spoke about making amends for past mistakes with the same drive and energy he had always displayed. We talked about the past; he was sorry he had caused upset for the Church and he told me he felt he had betrayed the trust of the Irish people, but there was no discussion of awkward episodes from his past. Introspection was never Eamonn’s strong point.

I had first met Eamonn Casey – then the Bishop of Galway – in 1978 when, as a rookie project officer for Trócaire, the overseas development agency for the Catholic Church in Ireland, I had sent a memo to the board asking for guidance on how to respond to the growing violence in Central America. Casey, who had co-founded Trócaire in 1973 and was its first chairman, swept into the meeting, full of charm and good humour, in a whirl of energy, having driven up from Galway to Dublin.
He loved driving and was infamous for near-misses, his favourite driving instruction being, “He who hesitates is lost”. I was given 15 minutes to make my case but, as he became caught up in my account of the horrors of the killings in El Salvador and Guatemala, the meeting spilled over into dinner.