An Irish priest has been jailed for hiring men who said they were IRA paramilitaries to issue death threats and intimidate his nephew into dropping legal action against him.
Former hospital chaplain Father Francis Kelleher, 59, pleaded guilty to four counts of coercion at the circuit court in Cork in southern Ireland and is facing action by the local Catholic diocese.
The court heard that Kelleher paid three men who said they were from the Continuity IRA, a breakaway faction of the IRA, to threaten his nephew, Niall Kelleher, in 2012 and 2013.
Niall Kelleher had been planning to take a civil case against his uncle, and sent the priest a solicitor’s letter before the threats began.
Shortly afterwards the father of three received a number of intimidating visits and phone calls from the men.
Telling him they were from the Continuity IRA, the three men demanded he drop his case against his uncle and threatened that if he did not, he would not “see the following week”.
Sources close to the hardline paramilitary movement denied their members had helped the priest, saying those involved in Cork were “connected to a criminal gang” and a “blight on the name of republicanism”.
According to dissident republican sources, the men belong to a breakaway faction of CIRA based in southern Ireland who were expelled from the organisation several years. They have no links to CIRA’s political wing, Republican Sinn Féin (RSF).
Irish police arrested Francis Kelleher in November 2013 and the priest admitted that he had paid €4,000 (nearly £3,000) to have his nephew threatened.
In sentencing Kelleher to four years in jail, judge Seán Ó Donnabhain described what happened as “appalling behaviour” and said it was a “profoundly upsetting case”.
In a statement after the verdict, the bishop of Cork and Ross, John Buckley, said the diocese would initiate canonical proceedings against Kelleher, who has been suspended from performing religious duties.
“It is deeply regrettable that such an offence could have been committed by anyone, and particularly by a priest,” Buckley said.
“I sincerely sympathise with those whose lives were endangered or who may have been harmed in any way by these events.”
CIRA was the first armed faction to be formed in opposition to the peace process in Ireland. Its membership split away from the mainstream Provisional IRA at the end of the 1980s. The group is regarded as the most ideologically rigid and hardline of all the three main dissident republican factions still waging “armed struggle” against the Northern Ireland state. In March 2009 a CIRA sniper shot dead Constable Stephen Carroll in County Armagh – the first Police Service of Northern Ireland officer killed by paramilitaries.
