Two Ways of Looking at George Gibney
July 22, 2025Full Text of George Gibney Extradition Article in the Colorado Springs Gazette on July 14
July 24, 2025PREVIOUSLY:
“‘Ireland secures extradition of notorious youth coach George Gibney who fled to Colorado in the 1990s’ — today in the Colorado Springs Gazette,” July 14, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16153
“‘As predator George Gibney is extradited: what really happened’ — at Ireland’s Village Magazine,’”
July 22, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16171
by Irvin Muchnick
And so it falls on your humble correspondent to become “the George Gibney whisperer.” This because, by law, the news media inside Ireland are forbidden from naming him during the pendency of a criminal trial, for 79 out of the universe of more scores or hundreds of sex offense counts that could have been toted up – a trial, by the way, that might not ever come off.
Fortunately, the Irish have a hearty sense of humor to go with their maddeningly indirect way of expressing themselves. Not that there’s anything funny about an opaque record of the undisputed gold medalist poster boy for the unaccountable unsafety of the world’s children in the sport of competitive swimming.
Today, thanks to the Irish Independent, we learn that Frank McCann, serving a sentence for murder, is spotted back on Dublin streets “despite ‘threat to society’ warning from parole board.” https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/crime/double-killer-frank-mccann-spotted-on-dublin-streets-despite-threat-to-society-warning-from-parole-board/a2009425790.html.
Though McCann’s parole bid has been denied, he enjoys unsupervised temporary release from Mountjoy Prison “several days a week to attend an employment course in the south inner city, and also to attend a city library before returning to jail for the night.”
Who is Frank McCann? He’s a swim coach who was a major figure in the 1980s and 90s scandals that caused the Irish Amateur Swimming Association to order new stationery with the heading “Swim Ireland.”
George Gibney’s predecessor Irish Olympic swimming head coach Derry O’Rourke landed in prison for sexual abuse. So did Ger Doyle, their successor. (My reporting suggests that Doyle also might have been Gibney’s accomplice in his 1982 molestation of an 11-year-old girl at the pool of the old Burlington Hotel in Dublin’s Ballsbridge district. Doyle committed suicide after his release from prison.)
Frank McCann found himself in the slammer, too, but he upped the ante. McCann raped and impregnated an underage swimmer with special needs. He didn’t want his wife and their baby niece (whom they were in the process of adopting) ever to find out – so he burned down their house in Dublin, killing them inside.
McCann headed the Leinster branch of the swimming association. One of the most valuable nuggets of the painstaking timeline of all things Gibney compiled by Olga Cronin and John Ryan of the late, lamented alternative news site Broadsheet.ie is that McCann was confronted by another coach, Carol Walsh, in whom the root Gibney abuse whistleblower Chalkie White had confided.
“I hope to fuck” none of this breaks on my watch, Walsh said McCann told her.
*****
As for the anticipated Gibney trial (or, excuse me, the proceedings of the “man in his 70s,” as the Irish Times and their flock would have it), I give my standard advice to readers: don’t hold your breath. Indeed, breathe on both sides; that will improve your freestyle form.
The prospect of Trial of the Century grist is highly unlikely. As these things go, the evidence will be confined to the specific allegations of the four newly emerging women accusers. The competent defense will grill them on times, dates, and details of alleged incidents, probably along with exhaustive inventories of all their sex acts before and since.
That’s assuming there’s a trial at all. Using the playbook of well-connected abusers in Irish history who get busted way too late, Gibney may well plead out, sparing all of us the opportunity of seeing him in the dock. And maybe finding out if the plea deal keeps him forever masked in the Irish media, playing out the string as “a man in his late seventies,” then eighties.
