[4][5] Brought up in Ballynoe in County Cork, Casey's father was a council worker and farmer, while her mother worked as a public health nurse.
[18] Casey also opposes abortion,[19][20][21][22][23] surrogate pregnancy,[24] anonymous donor in vitro fertilisation,[25] non-traditional family units,[26] adoption by gay parents, and same-sex marriage.
[8] In a November 2009 interview on Newstalk's The Wide Angle programme, Casey criticised the way in which the Catholic Church dealt with child sexual abuse.
The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland later found the interview to have been conducted in an "unfair and non-objective manner" and described Karen Coleman's questioning of Casey as "inappropriate" and "unjustified".
In July 2012, Casey accused the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin of undermining the confidence of young priests by both criticising them for being "traditional" and referring to them as "fragile".
They have stated that her claim that children do better when raised by married heterosexuals is "not valid based on our findings... no comparisons were made with gay or lesbian family constellations in the studies included in the review.
"[35] Anna Sarkadi, the study's lead author, also commented, "I find it interesting that, since the report was published, we have been contacted by many ultra-conservative groups who are saying that it supports their point.
[38] The journalist Caroline O'Doherty wrote that Casey, an advocate of Prozac and related SSRI treatments, was speaking following the publication of a study in the British Medical Journal which asserted that counselling had no benefits for patients with depression.
Casey was referring to a study on depression published in the British Medical Journal on 1 May 1999 by Ulrik Fredrik Malt, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oslo who provided expert evidence at the trial of Anders Behring Breivik.
In response to similar claims by Casey in the Sunday Business Post of 4 July 1999 ( 'Counsellor, Heal Thyself' ), Ivor Browne, Casey's predecessor as Professor of Psychiatry at University College Dublin, wrote in the Sunday Business Post on 11 July 1999 that the reference to counselling in the paper was merely incidental and that the concern of the paper was a comparison of one anti-depressant with another, continuing that; This study did not involve any significant psychotherapy of counselling input.