John Creagh

Who was John Creagh?

John Creagh was an Irish Redemptorist priest who is best known for delivering anti-Semitic sermons in Limerick in 1904 which incited riots against the small Jewish population in the city.

In 1906, in the Philippines where he had been sent as a missionary, he had a nervous breakdown. A year later he was posted to Wellington. By 1914, he was in Australia and, in May 1916, when he was rector of the Redemptorist monastery in Perth and when the German Pallotine missionaries had been interned, was appointed vicar apostolic at Broome in the Kimberley region. He was parish priest at Bunbury, Pennant Hills and Waratah where he suffered a stroke. After recovering from the stroke, he spent the rest of his life conducting retreats and preaching. He died at a monastery in Wellington.

While at Broome, Creagh and his brother acted against the white-oriented racial politics of Western Australia. In 1915, A. O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines argued that the Catholic mission at Lombadina should be closed because the property of 20,000 acres belonged to a Filipino from Manila, Thomas Puertollano, who was married to an Aboriginal woman and was technically employing the Aborigines.