Crooks 2, p.6
Crooks 2, page 6
Once the publicity tour for The General was out of the way I started interviewing Phyllis and Ross, going in and out of the house through the back door to avoid attracting attention. I found Phyllis Hamilton, who liked to be called Phyl, to be a kind and very generous woman who was extremely vulnerable. She had suffered with her mental health throughout her life which had been exacerbated by her dysfunctional secret relationship. There were a lot of tears, and it was obvious that she was still grieving for Father Michael. But her mind and her memory were razor sharp. She had an extraordinary story to tell.
In the first instalment Phyl chain smoked as she told me:
Michael and I secretly shared marriage vows twenty-seven years ago and lived together as man and wife. I loved him with all my heart and when he died a part of me died with him. In fact I think I loved him from the moment I met him.
If he came back and discovered what has happened to us he would raise absolute war. . . He would be outraged to see how his family and friends have rejected us and how deeply hurt and mixed-up Ross is.
The past 18 months have been hell on earth for us. I find it so hard to believe that we have so many enemies simply because people consider our relationship to be an unmentionable scandal. We have been made to suffer because so many people made a virtual God out of a very human man and they refuse to accept that yes, he DID live a double life.
They put him under tremendous pressure by placing him on a pedestal. He felt compelled to live up to their adulation. On one hand he was a very good priest who was caring and compassionate with a deep love of his people. On the other Michael was a lover, a father and a great friend.
There were times when, like the rest of us, he was selfish, immature and irresponsible, as well as being kind, loving and considerate.
The people who cannot face up to his secret life seem to forget that he was an ordinary man. Michael was three things – a priest, an entertainer and a man – he was the only man I have ever loved. . .
And I will love him and cherish the memories of life with him until the day I die, and no one will take that from me. That is why I have decided to put the record straight for our son’s sake so that when I am gone, he can hold his head high and not be afraid to say who his father was.
We have suffered so much rejection and isolation that it is time we told our story so that the ordinary people of Ireland can judge for themselves.
Life had not dealt Cleary’s unofficial ‘wife’ a fair hand. She had a tough upbringing in a home where she was beaten by her mother and sexually abused by an alcoholic father. Phyllis had also spent time in care in an appalling orphanage run by nuns. She revealed how she began a relationship with Cleary at the age of seventeen when he was twice her age.
It became clear that he had groomed and taken advantage of an innocent child. The ‘marriage vows’ they had exchanged are part of a classic grooming process. She described how he had then suggested that they consummate the ‘marriage’. In his efforts to explain to his ‘bride’ how this worked she described how he masturbated in front of her. Many of the more lurid details of the story we kept out of the newspaper articles and I used them in her book.
Then two years later, when she was nineteen, she fell pregnant with the first of Michael’s two sons. In March 1970 she gave birth to a boy she named Michael Ivor. They represented the first names of the two most important men in her life: Cleary and her longstanding psychiatrist Ivor Browne. Cleary arranged to have the child adopted. A year after Phyllis first went public that child was identified as Douglas Boyd Barrett, a brother of People Before Profit TD Richard Boyd Barrett, the adopted son of actress Sinéad Cusack. Douglas later appeared on the Late Late Show to tell his story.
Ross was born in 1976. She told me how Michael had pressurized her to put the child up for adoption. He could easily arrange it through his powerful contacts. However, she had held firm and insisted on keeping their son. After that they lived like a family. Phyl firmly believed that it was the intense stress of possibly being exposed in the wake of the former Bishop Casey scandal that had brought on Michael’s cancer. Casey, she revealed, had been privy to their secret but the sharing of confidences hadn’t been reciprocal.
As we waded slowly through the details of her troubled life there was an added tragic complication in the story which we would have to explain. Phyllis had a third child, a daughter Felicia, who had been born in January 1985. Felicia was later adopted by Phyll’s friend and reared in Florida.
She told me how her daughter had been conceived when she was raped by a trainee priest. The deacon had been living with Michael, Phyl and Ross at the parochial house in Finglas when the attack took place. Cleary had moved to the sprawling suburb from Ballyfermot a year earlier when he was promoted to parish priest. The offender who subsequently dropped out before being ordained, had discovered the truth about Ross.
One night, when Cleary was out playing poker (he was a serious gambler), the deacon attacked Phyllis. She explained how she could not report the rape to the police for fear that her secret would be exposed. Her story was later corroborated by a number of sources who were aware of the secret, including Professor Ivor Browne, who had been treating Phyl for several years.
Browne later confirmed to me that Cleary had admitted everything to him about the relationship from the time it started. She believed that the deacon, who died several years ago, had also been blackmailing Cleary at the time. She always regretted the loss of her daughter but felt that if she was to stay with Michael, she would have to let the child go. It would not be acceptable for her to have two children living in the parochial house. Their secret dysfunctional love had created an appalling human tragedy.
I had to be careful how I wrote the story: she wanted it to reflect her enduring love for Michael throughout their twenty-seven years together. She didn’t want him portrayed as the charlatan that was becoming more apparent with every interview.
Ross was a very articulate, intelligent eighteen-year-old kid. But it was hardly surprising that he was also angry and confused. He had a deep love for his father but growing up as a secret son had taken a terrible toll. His mother spoke of how Michael had spoilt Ross and even allowed him to start smoking when he was a young teenager. Ross lamented the fact that he had never been able to call Michael ‘Dad’. The public denunciations and rejection after Cleary’s death had also seriously harmed him. I had to deploy all the empathy and understanding I could muster to help them tell their stories.
As the print date grew closer it remained one of the best kept secrets in the Dublin media. In the Sunday World only a few people were kept in the loop to avoid a leak. There was always the possibility, however slight, that Cleary’s family could come at us with an injunction. And then there was the fact that our top columnist, Fr Brian D’Arcy, had been a close friend of Michael Cleary. I felt that in some way I was betraying Brian for whom I had great affection. Brophy told me that he would deal with that awkward issue when the time came.
Colm MacGinty and the chief subeditor, JP Thompson, began mapping out the pages for the first week’s instalment behind the locked door of the editor’s office. The first week’s coverage, including the exclusive family pictures, was to run over eight pages – all of which I had to fill.
On the Thursday of that week photographer Val Sheehan was dispatched to spend a day with Phyl and Ross taking portrait pictures of them to accompany the bombshell disclosures. At the same time the advertising department in the Sunday World was instructed to advise advertisers to ensure their ads were in the paper that weekend as there was a monster exclusive coming that everyone would be reading.
I had withdrawn to my home to write the biggest exclusive story yet in my career. I wrote it on the same old PC I had borrowed from our niece Sharon Donnelly to write The General on. With a young family, a mortgage and a modest wage, I couldn’t afford a computer of my own at the time. When I had finally written the first instalment I put it on a floppy disc and brought it into the office for Brophy and MacGinty to read.
I remember how nervous I was when they sat down to read it. I heard a few grunts emanating from Brophy and then he remarked: ‘Jesus Christ, I never thought I would be reading a story like this in all my years in journalism. . . this is unbelievable.’ I was relieved. We had a winner on our hands.
We had arranged to take Phyl and Ross out of town in anticipation of the storm that was going to break that Sunday morning as they didn’t want to be in Dublin for it. There would be a lot of journalists calling to the house in Harold’s Cross after the exposé appeared.
On the Friday Colm and I drove in bright sunshine to the village of Donard in the Glen of Imaal where his friend owned an isolated holiday home. We wanted to check it out and hoped that they would feel safe there away from the madness. I took them to the house on Saturday morning. The hideaway had been stocked up with plenty of food and was equipped with all the creature comforts so they could enjoy the heatwave we were experiencing.
I went back to Dublin to wait for the first editions to roll off the presses. The whole front page was taken up with a monster picture of Michael Cleary with his arm around Phyl’s shoulder. She looked tiny beside her lover. Superimposed on the picture was another picture of Phyl and Ross taken a few days earlier. The headline simply read: ‘My life with Fr Michael Cleary – by the mother of his son and his wife of 27 years’. The strap across the bottom of the page declared: ‘The love affair that could never be told until now’. It was understated, in keeping with Brophy’s advice that the story would tell itself. I brought the copy of the newspaper back to the house in Donard and showed it to Phyl and Ross. The tears they cried were of sadness and relief that their lives were no longer a scandalous secret.
Readers of a certain age will probably wonder why the story was such a big deal. A prominent clergyman being revealed as a secret dad and lover today would still probably make front page news but would not be so shocking or groundbreaking. But history would show that the Cleary story added to the gradual process of eroding the Church’s influential grip on Irish society. In particular it prompted people to question the hypocrisy and double standards in relation to the Church’s attitude to celibacy and women.
The story caused a maelstrom of reaction. It became the main topic of news and conversation across the country. The paper sold out everywhere on that blistering hot day that I will never forget.
I was interviewed for the six and nine o’clock news broadcasts. I fell into the role of defending the story and became a de facto spokesperson for Phyllis which goes with the territory. At the time our strategy was to deny that we had paid her any money. The decision was taken because that would become the story, and it would have been used to undermine her motives which were always genuine. We knew there would be a lot of powerful people determined to use their influence to dismiss the revelations.
The initial reaction of Cleary’s famous friends was to deny and refute the story. Others went on the offensive to discredit the woman and the muck-raking sleazy tabloid rag. But as the shock wore off the realisation set in that there was no way in hell a newspaper would run such a story without rock solid information and corroboration. Over time shock and anger eventually gave way to reluctant acceptance that their friend was no more infallible than anyone else.
However, the next day Michael’s sister, Patricia Moynihan, spoke to RTÉ news to express her ‘great disappointment at these fantasies and allegations being made’. She said: ‘We totally deny them; they are absolutely untrue. There is no credibility to them, good, bad or indifferent.’ She added that ‘charity prevents me from saying anything more that might hurt Ross or Phyllis.’
Bishop Thomas Flynn the spokesman for the Irish Church hierarchy bluntly said they did not believe the story, declaring it to be ‘a complete fabrication’.
Father Brian D’Arcy told RTÉ that his friend had always denied the rumours. He was understandably angry and upset with us. In the first days after the story broke Brian considered resigning from the newspaper. There is no doubt that he was coming under pressure from his own hierarchy and had been placed in a very difficult situation. Brian was adamant that the references to him in Cleary’s letter to Phyllis did not mean that he was aware of the secret relationship. Phyllis and Ross, however, claimed that he did know.
While he made no apologies for the exposé Michael Brophy used all his powers to convince Brian not to resign. The role of the media is to tell the truth without fear or favour, no matter how unpalatable or personally hurtful it may be. Brian was clearly hurt by the revelations and Brophy gave him a right of reply in the following week’s paper.
Under the headline: ‘In defence of a dead friend who can’t reply’ Brian wrote:
It has been one of my worst weeks ever. A good friend in life, Fr Michael Cleary has had his corpse picked over by a marauding media. He has been callously maligned without a right of reply. He has been labelled a hypocrite by sometimes sneering, lewd people.
In the days that followed the first publication Cleary’s family and friends briefed reporters of the existence of Felicia as proof that Phyl was a ‘loose woman’ who’d had children with different fathers. We had purposely held that part of her story for the second week’s instalment because we knew that it would be used to undermine Phyllis.
The front page that Sunday featured Ross’s story, accompanied by a picture of him with his father. It also carried a simple headline: ‘I called him Father but never Dad – By his son, Ross’. Also on the front page was the story about Felicia alongside a picture of Phyl with the child. We ran it with the child’s eyes blacked out to protect her identity. The picture had been taken when her friends had brought Felicia to see Michael and Phyllis in Harold’s Cross a few years earlier.
As part of the coverage for the second week psychiatrist Professor Ivor Browne took the unprecedented step of entering the fray. Phyl had been a patient of his since she was first admitted to St Brendan’s psychiatric hospital as a child after suffering sexual abuse in the 1960s. I had consulted the pioneering psychiatrist as part of my research in the weeks before publication. Like Peter Lennon, Ivor Browne was one of the heroes of the story. He was prepared to risk his professional reputation to come to the aid of his long-suffering patient. It said all that could be said about that remarkable man who passed away in January 2024 at the age of ninety-five.
When the furore blew up he said he was prepared to go public to defend Phyllis. He confirmed on the record that he had known of the secret relationship for decades. Before he could go public, however, he needed a letter from Phyl that officially authorized him to speak publicly.
He told me: ‘Michael always admitted to me that he was the father of Phyl’s two boys. He was always honest with me and there was no time when he denied that he was the boys’ father.’
Browne had also been aware of the rape incident. Such powerful testimony coming from such an unimpeachable source quickly silenced most of the detractors and deniers. But the establishment then went after him.
A year later the Medical Council censured Browne for alleged breach of confidentiality and ethical standards but ruled that he acted in the interests of his patient. Many were astonished by the censure. Ivor commented: ‘I still believe that my ethical duty was to do what I could to protect my patient. If the same circumstances arose again, I would do the same thing.’
In the weeks that followed I secured a publishing contract with Mainstream Publishing in Scotland. The ghostwriting process was a learning curve as I had to delve into the hidden depths of the story and tell it in Phyl’s words. I spent long hours interviewing her about the different chapters of her life.
A book requires a lot more information and detail than a newspaper article. It can hold over 100,000 words while the maximum that can appear in a newspaper is a fraction of that. It meant pursuing information in minute forensic detail. That process also produced some startling revelations. One in particular still stands out in my mind. When Phyllis fell pregnant with Ross, Cleary’s friend Eamonn Casey had strongly advised him to organize her to travel to the UK for an abortion. It elucidated the hypocrisy and lies at the centre of the Church.
Phyl also revealed how at one stage her mother Philomena had learned of the secret relationship. Philomena was a staunch Catholic, a daily mass goer who never drank or smoked. She was the very opposite to her husband, a drunk, a gambler and a child abuser. Phyl recalled how they had a loveless, acrimonious marriage. She also described how Philomena regularly beat her and was not a very loving mother. One day she received a letter in which her mother called her ‘a tramp, a hussy and a whore’. It caused serious distress to Phyl when her mother threatened to expose the ‘evil’ relationship to the bishops, the media and even the Pope. However, she was later convinced by her daughter to remain silent about the relationship.
Other more quirky details slipped out. I found a recurring reference to someone called ‘Salvador’ which appeared in several of the letters Michael had written to her over the years. One of the letters was from 1974 when Cleary had gone to visit his sister in Canada. His brother-in-law, a doctor, had diagnosed a malignant growth on his thyroid gland.
Before he came home to start treatment Cleary spent a few days gambling in Las Vegas. The letterhead was from the famous Stardust Casino in Vegas. But apart from the shock news of his cancer another paragraph caught my eye:
There’s a big fellow called Salvador here and he’s coming to Ireland soon. He’ll stay in ‘Ballyer’. I told him you would look after him well – he’s looking forward to that. He’s an excitable sort of guy but I think you’ll enjoy him.
On another occasion when Phyllis was visiting family in the US he mentioned the mystery man again: ‘Salvador is driving me mad wondering when you will come home.’
