George Gibney can run from Ireland but his past will always find him | Barry Glendenning

The former Ireland Olympic swimming coach was accused of sexual offences dating back decades and a new podcast series renews hope his victims will finally see justice done

It’s taken her decades to get here but in conversation at her home in Cork, Tric Kearney could well be discussing the gruelling training sessions she undertook as a talented child swimmer when she matter-of-factly describes the repeated rapes to which she was subjected by her coach. “Two times a day at least, maybe,” she recalls. “And it could be anything and everything. It was pretty severe.”

Kearney’s is just one of several extremely harrowing testimonies given by victims of a man known to everyone over a certain age in Ireland. During the 1980s, George Gibney enjoyed a weirdly high profile as a quasi-celebrity Dublin-based swimming coach despite working in a sport at which Irish athletes rarely excelled. Over the course of a year, fame turned to infamy following the revelation he was also a paedophile accused of sexually and psychologically abusing some of those entrusted to his care as children over the course of at least 25 years.