{"id":536787,"date":"2026-07-07T03:20:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T03:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/536787\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T03:20:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T03:20:16","slug":"george-gibney-the-child-sex-abuser-who-became-irelands-olympic-swimming-coach-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/536787\/","title":{"rendered":"George Gibney: The child sex abuser who became Ireland\u2019s Olympic swimming coach \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

To the current generation of swimmers, the name George Gibney<\/a> may mean very little. But in the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s, the former swimming coach had an oddly high profile in Ireland. <\/p>\n

He was the go-to person in aquatic sport, a swimming coach who employed modern methods of lactate testing for training elite athletes in how to compete at international level. <\/p>\n

At that time Ireland was a country that did not have a 50m Olympic sized swimming pool.<\/p>\n

Gibney even had a plan to build such a pool at his Trojan swimming club in south Dublin, which he set up in 1976, having moved from the nearby Glenalbyn swimming club. <\/p>\n

A Dubliner<\/a>, Gibney was the quintessential press-friendly, can-do coach with big plans and a club the top swimmers in Ireland naturally gravitated towards.<\/p>\n

His career curve was steep and by the time the Los Angeles Games in 1984 and the Seoul Olympics of 1988 came around, he had risen through the ranks and established himself as Ireland\u2019s Olympic coach.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The George Gibney trial: \u2018Predatory\u2019 abuser operated at heart of Irish swimmingOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In 1991, he became the Irish Amateur Swimming Association\u2019s national director of swimming.<\/p>\n

It was during this time that Gibney coached Gary O\u2019Toole, the generational swimmer, who punched through at international level, becoming the 200m breaststroke silver medal winner at the 1989 European Long Course Championships in Bonn.<\/p>\n

It was O\u2019Toole who triggered the initial investigations into his coach\u2019s behaviour after a swimmer had confided in him that Gibney had tried to molest him.<\/p>\n

\"SwimmerSwimmer Gary O’Toole. Photograph: Inpho <\/p>\n

Other swimmers then came forward to make statements to the garda\u00ed<\/a>. Gibney appeared in the D\u00fan Laoghaire District Court in 1993, where he faced 27 charges of indecent assault against young swimmers under the age of 15.<\/p>\n

Those allegations were successfully halted by the Supreme Court in a judicial review when Gibney\u2019s lawyers argued he should not stand trial due to the length of time that had elapsed and the lack of specificity of the charges.<\/p>\n

No case was ever heard in Dublin. The Director of Public Prosecutions did not appeal the decision and Gibney went free, fleeing first to the Warrender swimming club in Edinburgh, Scotland and then the US, where he went to Colorado before finally settling in Orlando, Florida.<\/p>\n

Then in February 2018, The Second Captains production company in conjunction with the BBC released a 40-minute podcast called The George Gibney Case: 25 Years On. That became a 10-part podcast series, Where is George Gibney?, and after it, four complainants, who were not involved in the 1990s case, came forward and made statements to garda\u00ed. <\/p>\n

The State then sought Gibney\u2019s extradition from the US.<\/p>\n

For the extradition, Garda members travelled to the US to accompany him back to Ireland. The operation was run by the Garda Extradition Unit, which is part of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation.<\/p>\n

The 77-year-old was subsequently arrested on arrival in Dublin in July 2025. In a statement on July 22nd, the Garda Press Office outlined that a man was being detained at a Garda station in Dublin.<\/p>\n

Gibney appeared at the Criminal Courts of Justice later that morning. He was initially charged with 78 counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted rape.<\/p>\n

He pleaded guilty to five counts of indecent assault, and not guilty to the remaining counts.<\/p>\n

However, this week Judge M\u00edche\u00e1l O\u2019Higgins directed the jury to return not guilty verdicts in relation to 33 counts of indecent assault relating to two complainants.<\/p>\n

It came after legal submissions were made, with counsel concluding that the evidence given did not support them. However, some 41 counts remained in play including 40 indecent assaults and one attempted rape across locations within the State.<\/p>\n

On Monday, he was convicted of sexually abusing four girls. He will be sentenced on July 29th. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the current generation of swimmers, the name George Gibney may mean very little. But in the 1970s,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[45,1578,16186,615,2195,228104,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-536787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-an-garda-siochana","tag-bbc","tag-director-of-public-prosecutions","tag-dublin","tag-florida","tag-george-gibney","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}