MAN TO RECEIVE £170K IN DAMAGES IN PRIEST SEX ABUSE CASE
A man who claimed a paedophile priest groomed and abused him at a school in Newry city is to receive £170,000 in damages.It forms part of a settlement reached in his High Court action over historic physical and sexual assaults inflicted by the late Fr Malachy Finegan.
He will also be given a written apology from the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, his lawyer disclosed.
The 57-year-old man, who cannot be identified, sued the Diocese of Dromore and the Board of Governors at St Colman's College in Newry over failures to protect him from the priest.
"Malachy Finegan took a vulnerable boy at a vulnerable time in my life, groomed me and then abused me for his own pleasure," he said after the case settled.
Referred to as CA, he was a pupil at St Colman's between 1979 and 1985.
During that period Finegan, who taught and worked at the college, molested him under the guise of providing pastoral care, it was claimed.
The priest was accused of a long campaign of child sexual abuse but never prosecuted or questioned by police about claims made against him.
Finegan died in 2002, but in 2018 it emerged that the Diocese of Dromore had settled a previous claim made by one of his alleged victims.
At that stage, the Board of Governors at St Colman's condemned the physical, sexual and emotional abuse inflicted by Finegan who also served as the school's president.
