FERGUS FINLAY:BARNARDOS CHIEF executive Fergus Finlay yesterday spoke about his own childhood physical and sexual abuse by a religious brother.
Mr Finlay said he had not set out to make “a revelation” but was tired of listening to the excuse that the culture had changed.
The head of the children’s charity was speaking in relation to Cardinal Brady’s response to the BBC documentary on the church’s handing of clerical sex abuse allegations.
“It is a complete myth to suggest that everything is excusable on the basis that the culture somehow changed. There has never been a time that abuse wasn’t abuse,” he said on Newstalk radio. “I was sexually abused in 1961 and I was physically abused in 1963; I was 11 and 13 respectively at the time.”
Speaking to The Irish Times last night, he said the abuse was by a religious brother. “I knew what it was, I knew it was abuse, when I told my father about it he knew it was abuse. He knew exactly what action needed to be taken and it was taken.”
Mr Finlay said that as far as he knew the action meant that other children were not later abused by the same man.
The former Labour senior official said he did not want to put himself in the category of some “brave” people “that have had to live with the consequences of horrendous abuse”.
Mr Finlay said was “lucky” because he had a father he could tell and the experience of it did not destroy his life. “I was not manipulated by the rather pathetic creature that abused me in the first place. I think it was too easy to say in those days we did not know what it was. A lot of people did know what it was.”
Mr Finlay was responding to the allegations in the BBC documentary that as notary in a 1975 church inquiry then Fr Seán Brady failed to pass on allegations of abuse to parents of some of the victims of paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth.
Mr Finlay said he found it “impossible to accept” that “a 35-year-old man with significant theological and moral training” could ask an abused boy the kind of questions he asked and “pass the notes on and do nothing further about it”.
