Remembering Bishop Lucey: response to a critic

It requires little or no effort, with the passage of time, to indulge in selective amnesia and view the past with rose-tinted spectacles.

Liam Burke, in his letter (Echo, 11/08/2025), criticising Cllr. Ted Tynan (Workers Party, Cork North-East Ward) for his proposal to change the name of Bishop Lucey Park to Páirc na mBan, seems thus afflicted in his idealistic, myopic appraisal of the Bishop’s somewhat surreptitious record and legacy.

The Bishop’s notoriety as a Roman Catholic Church authoritarian has already been well established and documented, as his fascistic-leaning pronouncements on social policy attest.*

Under such an authoritarian regime, where the clergy and religious congregations, through their various “institutions”, ruled by intimidation, fear and brutality, they were afforded ample opportunity and unchecked freedoms to abuse those in their care – physically, psychologically and sexually.

Whenever sufficient momentum accumulated for Church authorities to investigate cases of abuse in such “institutions”, the outcome, inevitably, resulted in some form of cover-up.

Such was Bishop Lucey’s handling of cases of sexual abuse at Greenmount Industrial School in 1955 as evidenced in the Ryan Report . (The same report shows that the perpetrators involved, largely left unchallenged, without any sanction, went on to leave trails of sexual abuse, in other settings, over the following decades).

The most recent report on sexual abuse in religious-run schools and “institutions”, the Scoping Enquiry, published by the Department of Education, September, 2024, contains an extensive nationwide list of cases, a subset of which pertains to schools in Cork – within a timeframe that coincides with Bishop Lucey’s term of office, in his role in the management of such schools.

There are enough inferences to be made about the conduct of Lucey, in this regard, to question the appropriateness of having a public park, in the city, associated with his name.

But, on his conduct relating to the establishment of St. Anne’s Adoption Society in 1954, his role in maintaining the Magdalene Laundries system, the various Mother & Baby Homes, including Bessborough, involving the incarceration of unmarried mothers, the forcible removal, theft and trafficking of their babies, the widespread practice of illegal adoptions (where official documents were forged such that the adoptive mother became registered as the birth mother), with money changing hands in secret deals organised by the religious congregations with approval by the Diocese run by Lucey, the secret deals made with various pharmaceutical companies to conduct experiments on the babies (in effect, human lab rats) – there’s enough damning evidence at hand to endorse Cllr. Tynan’s proposal to retire the name of Bishop Lucey Park and to rename the redesigned park on Grand Parade as Páirc na mBan.

By renaming the park to Páirc na mBan, we are giving official acknowledgment to the sufferings that the women victims of Lucey’s regime were forced to endure, a fitting commemoration of their lives, lived out in incarceration – a form of imprisonment and slavery – and providing some form of restitution for the remaining survivors and those offspring, both here and abroad, still in search of their true identity and family of origin. By removing Lucey’s name from the Park, we are also removing an affront to the cases of physical, psychological and sexual abuse that occurred throughout Cork schools, during his tenure as Bishop, and providing some redress for the victims.

It now seems incumbent that the people of Cork give their unqualified support to Cllr. Tynan’s motion, for all of the aforementioned reasons.