Brendan Dowling is a familiar face to many people from his work on Grafton Street, Dublin, in recent decades.
Until last year, when he “gave up the licence”, he had a stall across from Bewley’s cafe for 27 years, mainly selling leather belts.
A Christian Brother who abused Dowling, now 66, at the Abbey Primary School in Newry, Co Down, was given a 10-year sentence last week in Belfast.
Br Paul Dunleavy (89), whose life expectancy has been assessed as four years, “will die in prison”, said Det Chief Supt Lindsay Fisher, of the public protection branch of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
The sentencing followed a case involving 36 sexual abuse offences in relation to nine boys between 1964 and 1991. The offending was carried out at four schools in Belfast, Newry and Armagh. At the time the boys were aged seven to 14, but Brendan Dowling was not among them.
Dunleavy is already in prison having last year been sentenced to 10 years for 23 offences against four survivors. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for 13 offences involving five other survivors. In total he has been convicted of 72 offences involving 18 abuse survivors. Brendan Dowling is not one of them.
It has been widely reported that the first complaints against Dunleavy were made in 2010. This is inaccurate. In April 1998, Dowling wrote to the Christian Brothers detailing his abuse at a Newry school in 1969 by Dunleavy, then aged 34. This followed an appeal by the Christian Brothers to past pupils with grievances about treatment by its members “to come forward with their stories”.
“I had him the year of the 11+. Because it was primary school you were stuck with him all day. He was just a terror,” says Dowling of Dunleavy.
“The clearest example was how we’d get some spellings at the end of the day to learn for the next day. We weren’t allowed sit down. We’d line up with our hand out and you’d get a whack for every one you got wrong. Still today I can spell postage backwards – egatsop – because one day he told us to learn it back to front.”
He adds: “He was 34, which is why I think the photograph of me at that age and him at that age shows the dynamic.”
About his own abuse, Dowling says: “I would say, compared to everybody else, mine was trivial.
“There was an electricity set in the school that I loved, making circuits and lights and bells and batteries, which he was encouraging of. So then he asked me one day did I want to take it home, which was, to me, amazing. He said, ‘Stay over at the break’. So, during the break, he got me to sit on his knee. His thing at that stage [was that] he had me chewing his thumb for the whole break, every day.”
As Dowling put it in his 1998 statement to the Christian Brothers, it was “the same thing over and over”.
“I began to feel uncomfortable about this ‘game’ but also confused. I felt that I was special to him as he was not being so strict with me since the ‘game’ started – as he was with others. I now understand that there were sexual overtones to some of our conversations, but I did not understand them at the time. I certainly remember him asking me to ask my father what men had to do with babies being born.”
He adds: “The real damage was not just what happened physically, but the lessons I learned from it.”
Dowling says this “introduced me to a sense of bargaining and, over the next few years, when I was 12, 13, 14, I engaged in sexual activity with men in exchange for lots of different things.
“It took me probably until I got married to unravel that. No therapy, but I had lots of good friends who knew the scene.”
In his 1998 statement to the Christian Brothers, Dowling wrote: “I want Br Dunleavy, if he is still alive, to be made aware of the effect his selfishness had on such a young soul (I am hoping he did not do likewise to others) and I want your community to also acknowledge the unacceptability of such behaviour.”
He continued: “Let me stress – loud and clear – I do not want revenge or money.”
The Christian Brothers invited him to a meeting with its child protection service, which took place on July 24th, 1998.
Dowling says there was then “a big gap before they came back and just in that gap I said ‘okay, they’re not serious’.”
In May 1999 he received a letter to say Br Dunleavy had been informed the previous August and “made no response to the complaint at that time”. Dunleavy had “co-operated by attending an assessment centre”, Dowling was told.
There were then further gaps in correspondence. In December 1999, Dowling wrote to the Christian Brothers again, noting “once again, a further long period without any feedback or communication from you”.
They did follow up to say they have brought in the person [Br Dunleavy] but that there wasn’t enough to pursue the case
— Brendan Dowling
This was acknowledged briefly in January 2000, with a further letter in April of that year that said Br Dunleavy regretted the gap in contact of almost a year and stating: “Br Dunleavy wished to note that he has taken the complaint very seriously. He is attending therapy for the past 15 months to confront the issues raised.” Dunleavy also offered to meet him.
“I had no interest in meeting him,” says Dowling, adding that his priority was that the information he supplied “might be a piece in the jigsaw and I just wanted to make sure that was in the system”.
The case was reported to the PSNI. “They did follow up to say they have brought in the person [Br Dunleavy] but that there wasn’t enough to pursue the case. There was another person involved who didn’t want to come forward. If the other person had come forward there would have been a case.”
The PSNI, he says, “took a statement off me about Dunleavy”.
“They said that there was reason to be looking at him,” says Dowling. “That was the first time I realised there were other people. In the scheme of things mine [abuse] wasn’t outrageous but it confirms a pattern. Then they came back and said, ‘That case isn’t going ahead’.”
He says he had “a sense” there might be “three or four” abuse survivors at that stage, but the number has turned out to be far higher.
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