Justice Roderick Murphy, of the Irish Government’s Vague 1998 Report Calling George Gibney ‘The First Named Coach’ — Another Exhibit of National Cronyism
May 28, 2020BBC Says George Gibney Podcast Series Delayed Until August ‘Due to the Current Global Pandemic.’ Huh?
June 4, 2020by Irvin Muchnick
PREVIOUSLY:
“DOJ Human Trafficking Office Investigation of George Gibney Closes In — Which Means the Saga of the Most Notorious At-Large Sex Criminal in the History of Global Sports Is Climaxing, With a Bang or a Whimper,” February 9, 2020, https://concussioninc.net/?p=14173
“Muchnick on Ireland’s ‘Off the Ball’: We Have Everything on George Gibney ‘Except the Shoe Dropping’,” February 12, 2020, https://concussioninc.net/?p=14182
“Lissenfield — Historic Irish Site Where Skeletal Remains Turned Up — May Be Key in Establishing Link Between 1986 Philip Cairns Disappearance and George Gibney’s Social Circles,” May 24, 2020, https://concussioninc.net/?p=14499
“Justice Roderick Murphy, of the Irish Government’s Vague 1998 Report Calling George Gibney ‘The First Named Coach’ — Another Exhibit of National Cronyism,” May 28, 2020, https://concussioninc.net/?p=14503
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In February, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announced the upcoming May broadcast of a podcast series entitled Where Is George Gibney?, produced in partnership with Second Captains, the Irish sports podcasting company.
Last month an Irish source told me the series launch was being delayed a month. I now notice that it is June and the promotion at secondcaptains.com has been changed to say “August 2020.”
Second Captains producer Mark Horgan has not responded to my email asking for an explanation of the delay. (Monday is a holiday in Ireland. Any future response by Horgan will be reflected in Concussion Inc.’s coverage.)
At this site, I have noted that the title of the projected podcast series asks a trivial question, insofar as the current residence of George Gibney actually has been known for years. To the best of my knowledge, Gibney still lives on Breakwater Drive in Altamonte Springs, Florida, just north of Orlando — “hiding in plain sight,” as I put it.
I recognize, of course, that the title of a podcast series is not necessarily a comprehensive mission statement, but rather just a hook for the interest of prospective listeners. As I wrote in February, the BBC Sounds series “may prove to have significant new information, or it may prove to be applying, for the umpteenth time, broadcast production values to old information. Regardless, if it turns out theirs is the voice that nudges [government action, justice, and accountability], I’ll tip my hat.”
Meanwhile, the Irish Daily Star has reported that Gibney’s disgraced cohort Ger Doyle died last Friday at 59. The newspaper story, under the headline “PAEDO [pedophile] OLYMPIC COACH DIES,” does not run down Doyle’s connections to Gibney and the widespread coach sexual abuse scandals in the Irish swimming program that brought about the dissolution of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association (IASA) in 1998 and its rebranding as Swim Ireland.
Like coaching colleague Derry O’Rourke, Doyle served prison time for molesting youth swimmers. Another leading coach and IASA official, Frank McCann, was imprisoned for the murder of his wife and their baby daughter, by means of burning down their house — his way to conceal from her knowledge of his rape and impregnation of an underage girl.
In 2016, reviewing all this history in a ruling in my favor in my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for material from Gibney’s immigration files, U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer wrote that Gibney was the one who “got away.” At the final hearing, addressing Gibney’s continued presence in this country despite a failed application for naturalized citizenship in 2010, Breyer said from the bench: “I have to assume that if somebody has been charged with the types of offenses that Mr. Gibney has been charged with, the United States, absent other circumstances, would not grant a visa. We’re not a refuge for pedophiles.”
In 2017, a woman in Ireland contacted Concussion Inc. with a previously unreported instance of allegations of sex crimes by Gibney: his molestation of her in 1982, at age 11, during a private swimming instruction at the pool of Dublin’s exclusive Burlington Hotel. In the account of the alleged victim, “Julia,” Ger Doyle was working as the “lifeguard” at the pool and looked on.
A corporate spokesperson for the Dalata Hotel Group, current owner of the property, which is now named the Clayton Hotel Burlington Road, said there was no longer a swimming pool on the site and suggested there never had been. However, the online Irish news source Broadsheet quickly unearthed an archival newspaper story establishing that the hotel did, indeed, house an aquatics complex at the time in question.
Further, the story featured a photo of Gibney there alongside youth swimming star Gary O’Toole, who went on to become Ireland’s leading Olympic swimmer of the late 1980s and early 1990s. See https://concussioninc.net/?p=12080; https://concussioninc.net/?p=12083.
Though never personally a victim, O’Toole would learn of Gibney’s abuse of Chalkie White and others. O’Toole would become a key whistleblower and organizer of the push to bring individual coaches to justice and to reform the national swimming program.