Tuesday’s scoping inquiry report set out 2,395 allegations of abuse in schools against 884 alleged abusers. The inquiry, led by senior counsel Mary O’Toole, deals with 308 schools involving 42 religious congregations of the 69 that run schools in Ireland.
The inquiry has found that almost a quarter of the abuse allegations – some 590 – involved just 17 schools that catered for children with special needs.
The report, sparked by revelations of child sexual abuse in schools run by religious orders, notably at Blackrock College in south Co Dublin, run by the Spiritans, suggests that the overall number of allegations might be the tip of the iceberg of those affected by abuse in Irish schools.
This raises the issue of redress, and for how many. The 2009 Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse investigated 215 residential institutions for children run by 18 religious congregations.
A separate redress board, which ran alongside that commission, made payments of €1.3 billion, averaging €62,000 each, to 15,579 people.
This week’s report, which has recommended a commission of investigation be set up, says “consideration should be given to extending the terms of reference [of the new commission] to all schools”.
No one should underestimate the challenge involved. There are about 760 secondary schools in Ireland and 3,300 primary schools. The potential numbers of victims is staggering.
The report notes how figures from the 2022 Central Statistics Office Sexual Violence Survey indicated “significant levels of underreporting of childhood sexual violence, particularly among men”.
For men generally the rate is “25 per cent and for all adults in the age groups of 45 years and over, it is 40-42 per cent”.
Of those aged 35 years and over, “some 15,300 men and 26,000 women can be estimated to have experienced sexual violence as a child in a school”.
The publication of the report will inevitably prompt more people to come forward to tell their stories publicly.
One such person is Patrick – not his real name – a man in his late 40s who has spoken to The Irish Times this week about his abuse at Blackrock College in the late 1980s. He wants to protect his identity because not everyone in his family is aware of what he has been through and he wants to protect them.
Patrick was 13 when it happened. He was planning a sailing course and “needed a certification to say I could swim X amount of metres fully clothed”, he says.
His PE teacher at Blackrock, Br Gall, agreed to help him secure the certificate at PE class, which took place on Wednesdays. “In my PE bag I had an extra T-shirt and an old tracksuit and a pair of old trainers I was going to wear to jump into the pool to do these laps,” he says.
Br Gall – since deceased and then “about mid-50s, bald, had glasses, he would always go around in a tracksuit – brought me into his office at the swimming pool. He said: ‘Right, the first thing I’m going to show you how to do is to stretch.’ I was extremely naive, sexually immature. I had no idea about sex. I was completely innocent, clueless. But I do remember thinking it was curious that this gentleman was getting me to stretch.”
As a rugby player, Patrick “knew how to stretch. But he was the teacher. He wanted me to stretch, so I stretched. I was wearing a normal pair of 1980s speedos.”
Br Gall sat in a chair behind him “and he got me to do these stretches, which turned out to be like poses. I remember thinking, This is really weird.”
Much the same thing happened the following week. “I felt his hands on my hips and then I felt something hard up against my buttocks,” says Patrick. “I didn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t figure out what this was.”
The guy who finished first shouted at me: ‘You only got that because you are Br Gall’s bum boy’
— Patrick on being unfairly named winner of a swimming race
Then “one of my classmates popped his head around the corner. In that moment, I was literally bending over. I looked up and I remember seeing his [classmate’s] face going from normal to pale with shock, to bright red, in the space of a second.” The classmate became flustered, said: “Oh, sorry.” and ran away. Br Gaul said: “‘Okay – we’re finished for today’.”
There was a swimming gala the following Wednesday. “I was a pretty handy swimmer,” says Patrick, “but there were two other guys in the class who were much better.” At the final, “these two guys were in it and I remember the final lap, looking up as I was taking a stroke, to see one touch the wall, then the second guy touched the wall and then I touched the wall.”
Br Gall “touched me on the head and said I was first, the guy who finished first was second and the guy who finished second was third. The look on the winner’s face, I’ll never forget. It was pure fury, absolute rage. And I remember thinking, This is so unfair.”
When they got to the dressingroom, “the guy who finished first shouted at me: ‘You only got that because you are Br Gall’s bum boy.’ The guy who finished second said something like: ‘It’s a fucking disgrace, that should never have happened, you’re like a faggot’, or something.”
Patrick “genuinely didn’t understand what was happening. I knew it was unfair but I didn’t understand why I was being called a bum boy, especially this guy’s bum boy.” His standing in the class “fell to floating scum, shall we say, and the rest of that year was just a series of bullying. I can feel my face burning now, like it did then.” He avoided Br Gall after that.
It was probably his good fortune that his family moved from Dublin three months later, as his father got a job in another city. Patrick attended another rugby school there, but his life had changed irrevocably. There was “a distinct before and after. I changed completely”, he says. He felt “a loss of self-confidence, a complete loss of self-esteem, self worth”.
Outwardly, he was popular. A classmate remembers him as “well-liked, happy go-lucky, very funny, really good-looking, bright, a noted rugby player”. Patrick remembers it differently. “Rugby was the only thing that kept me going in secondary school. I liked girls but I never had the courage to go after the girls I liked. I only said yes to girls who asked me out.”
He was “like Chandler in Friends. I used to break up with girls for no reason. If self-sabotage was a course in university, I would be a tenured professor in MIT.”
He “got terrible marks” in his Inter Cert (now the Junior Cert). “I was playing rugby and kind of excused myself for that. I had to get on the team.” They were a successful side. When he was 16 he got “an absolutely beautiful” Valentine’s Day card from a girl. “I thought this is my mates playing a joke. I made no effort to find out who sent me that card, because I wasn’t worth it.” He never did find out.
In the years following, he “had a few, as I like to call them, mental haemorrhages”: drug abuse, suicidal ideation and two failed marriages. “I was completely obsessed with killing myself.” He has always done well at work but “basically, I have an ambivalence towards success”.
At 17 he was “diagnosed with severe depression”. That same year he first attempted suicide. He tried again in his mid-30s.
It was at a session with a psychologist after that second attempt his abuse by Br Gall came up for the first time, and “two and two was added in front of me. That was 22 years later.”
More recently he has taken part in the restorative justice programme at Blackrock and found it “very, very helpful”. He also spoke to the scoping inquiry team, who were “very kind”.
This week’s report was “a tough read”, he says. “I felt lucky compared to a lot of others. I couldn’t have handled more years of how I spent those last four months in Rock.”
Less “lucky”, perhaps, was Chris Doris. Such was his abuse in the 1970s at Willow Park, Blackrock, that it took “probably” 800 therapy sessions to help him recover. Today he considers himself “pretty free of it”, helped by a strong relationship with Rachel, his wife, friend and partner of more than 40 years.
In his case there were three abusers, all deceased: Br Luke McCaffrey, Fr Aloysius Flood and Fr Senan Corry. The worst abuse was when Flood and an unidentified priest drugged him with “something like chloroform” before Flood orally raped him. Another former Willow Park pupil had told him how he too was orally raped by Flood, while the second priest worried that the boy would remember. Flood said: “He won’t remember.”
Reflecting on this and previous reports, Doris believes “the church’s response continues to be devoid of Christian ethics”, while its approach has “exacerbated the agony of survivors and destroyed the church itself”.
He calls for “a non-adversarial inquiry, with reasonable and speedy financial redress, so that the carcass of clerical terror lying under the floorboards of many family homes can be removed with a modicum of finality”.
He finds “remarkable the human propensity to fuck up children – and then ignore it”.
Mark Vincent Healy, a long-time advocate for abuse survivors, was himself abused at St Mary’s College Rathmines by Spiritan priest Fr Henry Moloney (since laicised). In 2009 Moloney was convicted of the abuse.
Healy describes the content of the scoping inquiry report as “shocking”, adding that it was also “shockingly late – so late”.
In Ireland too survivors are still being denied “a lawful right to redress from the State as instructed by the European Court of Human Rights” in the case taken by Louise O’Keefe, a Cork woman who successfully sued the State for failing to protect her from the abuse she suffered a primary school in the 1970s in west Cork.
“This must change,” says Healy.
Time is running out for survivors awaiting investigation and redress.
Healy notes how this week has also marked “the eighth memorial for Pat Ryan, father of Mark and David”. Both brothers took part in the ground-breaking RTÉ radio I documentary Blackrock Boys, broadcast in November 2022, which led to the scoping inquiry.
Healy describes Pat Ryan as “a dear friend who met with me often”.
“His heart was broken but I am sure he would be heartened to know the day of reckoning is coming, and I hope his spirit will rest easier for it,” he says.
The first anniversary of Mark Ryan’s death is on September 21st.
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