Mission to Prey
Irish legal case
"Mission to Prey" is the title of an episode of the RTÉ programme Prime Time Investigates broadcast in May 2011. It falsely accused an Irish Catholic priest in Kenya of having fathered a child by engaging in child sexual abuse. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland fined the RTÉ as a result and the decision to air the programme was described as "one of the gravest editorial mistakes ever made" in the history of RTÉ broadcasting.
The broadcast
In January 2011 reporter Aoife Kavanagh and producer Mark Lappin, on a research trip to Kenya, believed they had found evidence of a sexual scandal involving Fr. Kevin Reynolds, an Irish Catholic priest. Their sources accused Fr. Kevin Reynolds of raping a teenage girl and fathering her child in Kenya. The (alleged) mother of the child verified these allegations. After a second research trip by the two, the executive producer of Prime Time Investigates, the editor of current affairs, and the managing director of News all agreed to broadcast the programme. A later investigation identified their actions as "groupthink" – all members of the team responsible for the broadcast believed that Father Reynolds was guilty.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mission to Prey” is irish legal case. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mission, Prey and Irish, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6878854. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mission to Prey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.