seven sins | 

Evil paedophile Bill Kenneally paid off boys in cash after sexual abuse

£7, £14, £21… “the bigger the number, the worse the ‘bating,” that is how one of his victims, Paul Walsh, now aged 51, described it.

Today at 21:00

‘Seven Deadly Sinner’ — that should be his moniker.

Bill Kenneally chuckled to himself as if he was taking a trip down memory lane when he admitted that he would give boys cash in sums of seven after he sexually assaulted them.

£7, £14, £21… “the bigger the number, the worse the ‘bating,” that is how one of his victims, Paul Walsh, now aged 51, described it.

Under cross-examination by a lawyer for six of his victims, Kenneally confirmed that he associated the number seven with good luck.

His grandfather had won a seat in the 1954 Waterford general election by 7,777 votes. From that point on, the Kenneally kin considered it to be their symbol of success.

Characterised as a powerful political family, they have been dubbed ‘the Kennedys of Waterford’. Their thriving business empire included a fleet of buses that all had the number seven in their registration plates.

At 10.50am on Tuesday, a chipper Bill Kenneally had his handcuffs removed and trotted into the inquiry.

Short and stout, dressed in a grey suit with a navy flecked tie, his chubby hands clutched a red and blue plastic bag stuffed with paperwork

The room was not set up like a courtroom. Instead he was positioned at a small table beside the chairman’s desk, a mere 10 metres away from where a group of his victims sat huddled together.

Kenneally’s sadistic smile was the first indication that he was going to relish taking centre stage and telling his side of the story. He was not in a witness box, he was on his soap box.

Kenneally shuffled the papers about on the table in front of him, trying to look like one of the 20-plus lawyers packed into the room. He had beady eyes and dark-rimmed glasses perched on his beak — but a legal eagle he was not.

The real lawyers in the room carried leather briefcases, not flimsy plastic bags with a prison number on the label.

But that did not stop him challenging Chairman Michael White – a respected former High Court judge – just minutes into proceedings.

At 10.53, Kenneally barked at the chairman. The root of this bizarre complaint? Michael White had not replied directly to him when he wrote to the Commission. Powerful people, which the Kenneallys were, cannot tolerate being ignored.

With a poison pen, Bill Kenneally has been scrawling whiny letters to the Commission, but following standard procedure they responded to Kenneally’s lawyer by way of a reply.

The deluded monster was offended by this, describing it as being just a “cabal of solicitors keeping each other in the loop”.

That single exchange – just three minutes into proceedings – set the tone for the two days that would follow.

His testimony was laden with a nauseating stench of self-entitlement as he lapped up the opportunity to force his victims to listen as he accused them of being willing participants in his deranged sexual attacks.

That gleeful grin only vanished when he was met by photographers outside to snap his miserable mug climbing back into the prison van.

In 2016, he was given his first sentence — 17 months for each of his ten victims involved in that first court case.

With a portion of each sentence suspended it totted up to 14 years, an ironic multiple of his so-called lucky number. As one of his victims put it: “We gave him back his final payment of seven and a dynasty crumbled that day.”