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January 5, 2016by Irvin Muchnick
Our January 15 hearing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, in the Freedom of Information Act dispute over the 100-plus pages of rapist former Irish national swim team coach George Gibney’s American immigration records, has been pushed back to February 12. I believe the delay is caused by Judge Charles Breyer’s concurrent duties in presiding over a high-profile criminal case.
Meanwhile, the campaign to hold accountable one of Gibney’s old Irish colleagues proceeds in Canada. John Furlong, who was CEO of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, taught and coached sports at the Newpark School in County Dublin at the same time Gibney started there in the 1970s. Prior to that, in 1969 (in an interlude carefully scrubbed from his bestselling autobiography), Furlong was a physical education instructor at a Catholic missionary school in Burns Lake, British Columbia. In that role, he was undeniably cruel and abusive to his students — as established by the reporting of writer Laura Robinson — and also is accused of having sexually abused a number of them. See https://concussioninc.net/?p=10506.
At Robinson’s website, http://www.justtrylistening.org/, you can read the full text of the recent appeal to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for Furlong’s removal from the Olympics-affiliated group Share the Podium, from eight members of the Lake Babine Nations.
The letter concludes with a rebuttal to the smear that Furlong’s former students “just want money”:
“We never asked for money. We just wanted our voices heard.”