Former Irish and Olympic coach Derry O’Rourke is one of three infamous sexual predators whose crimes against young athletes contributed to the collapse of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association (IASA) in the 1990s.
Revelations about O’Rourke, George Gibney, an Irish national and Olympic swimming coach who fled Ireland in 1993 amid a blizzard of accusations but who was never convicted of an offence, and Frank McCann, a vice-president of the IASA who murdered his wife and 18-month-old foster daughter in 1991 by setting their home ablaze rather than have them find out he had fathered a child with an underage swimmer, caused national horror and upheaval in the world of swimming.
McCann, a president of the Leinster branch of the IASA, had been the person some parents had gone to with their concerns about Gibney, about whom rumours involving the abuse of teenage boys and girls had been circulating since the early 1990s.
When O’Rourke was first convicted in 1998, parents went to the then minister for sport, Jim McDaid, who set up an non-statutory inquiry into how the litany of abuse in Irish swimming could have occurred. The eventual report criticised the supervision of coaches but did not report on who knew what, and when, and who acted on the information they had and who did not. IASA, meanwhile, was replaced by a new organisation, Swim Ireland.
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O’Rourke, a married father of six children from Edenderry, Co Offaly, was sentenced to 12 years in jail in 1998 for the sexual abuse of 11 girls. The 29 charges to which he pleaded guilty involved unlawful carnal knowledge, sexual assault and indecent assault between 1976 and 1992.
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The former coach was jailed for a further 10 years in 2005 for the rape and sexual assault in the late 1970s of a former student at a west Dublin boarding school, when the victim was aged between 14 and 17. Because the sentence was backdated, it did not result in his serving any extra time.
The notorious predator was released from prison in March 2007, having received the normal one quarter remission for good behaviour.
In 2008, 12 of the swimming coach’s victims reached settlements with Swim Ireland and King’s Hospital school, Palmerstown, arising from their being abused by him at the school.
In 2010, O’Rourke had an address at Barrack Street, Bailieborough, Co Cavan, when he was given a suspended sentenced after he pleaded guilty at the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to indecently assaulting a then 14-year-old girl in the early 1970s. The victim had made a complaint to gardaí in 2008.
Judge Katherine Delahunt noted the “intense supervision” O’Rourke was under and said she did not believe the community would be best served by sending him back to prison.
In an article in Magill magazine in 2007, when it was reported that O’Rourke was being released from prison, journalist Justine McCarthy wrote that the human devastation he had caused could never be measured.
“There have been suicides, attempted suicides, family estrangement, marriage failure, long-term psychiatric care for alcoholism and depression, financial problems and emigration,” she wrote.
“Most of the women who testified in the three separate sets of court proceedings that made O’Rourke the country’s most notorious paedophile believe that there are many more victims who have never broken their silence.”
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