Brendan Comiskey

Brendan Comiskey, is the Roman Catholic Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Ferns. He was born on 13 August 1935 in Clontibret, County Monaghan, Ireland.

He was ordained a priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary on 25 June 1961, and appointed Bishop of Ferns on 4 April 1984. He had served as Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin since 1979.

He resigned on 1 April 2002, over charges that he had failed to deal adequately with allegations that Fr. Seán Fortune and others were sexually abusing children.

Comiskey's early clerical career was extremely promising. He was head of his order in Ireland and the UK by the age of 34, became an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Dublin at age 45 and soon thereafter was appointed to the Diocese of Ferns at the age of 47. In 2016 his name still appeared on the website of his congregation where he said to be a retreat giver whose conferences are "filled with profound content mixed with wit and humour."

Brendan Comiskey succeeded the ebullient Donal Herlihy as Bishop of Ferns in 1984. Herlihy, a former staff member at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, is reported to have had alcohol-related issues in his last years as bishop and his governance of the diocese was slack. As a result of The Ferns Report, published by the Irish Government on 25 October 2005 into child sex abuse in this diocese (between 1962 and 2002), the wider Irish public became aware of a catalogue of abuse going back to Herlihy's tenure on office involving 100 individual cases involving 21 priests.

It is alleged that Tomás Ó Fiaich, Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, had been told about the allegations, as had the Holy See.

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