To the outside world, they must have looked like “the perfect family”, says Paula Fay, who grew up as Paula Brennan in Rathfarnham, south Dublin.
“We would have been regarded as fairly affluent; we went to Mass every Sunday as a family, all dressed to the nines,” she recalls.
“My mother would say to us: ‘Anything that goes on in this house is to stay within the four walls of this house’ and ‘woe betide anyone who tells’.”
Behind closed doors, the Brennans’ family life was very far from perfect.
RM Block
When then 12-year-old Catherine Brennan, now Catherine Wrightstone, disclosed in 1984 she was being sexually abused by her older brother Richard, her parents reacted with disbelief.
Her mother called her “a liar” and “a dirty b***h” who was “ruining” her brother’s reputation, Catherine says.
Her older sisters, Paula and Yvonne – now Yvonne Crist – then in their 20s, immediately believed her. They too were sexually abused by Richard and by their oldest sibling, Bernard, but they did not disclose that abuse until years later because of what Fay calls a “massive fear”.
“We knew our mother would not believe us, she doted on Richard, especially when he wanted to be a priest,” Yvonne says.
“We went to Mass, the fear of God was always put in us.”
It was a typically big Irish family of the time, with seven children and 17 years between the oldest and youngest children: Bernard, who was born in 1957; Yvonne (born 1959), Richard (1961), Paula (1964), Eamonn (1965), Catherine (1971) and Sinéad (1974).
Last month Bernard Brennan, now 67, was jailed for 4½ years years after admitting 11 counts of indecent assault of Paula and Yvonne between 1972 and 1975 when all three were minors. His abuse began when he was 13, Yvonne was 12 and Paula was six or seven.
On Monday, Richard Brennan, aged 64, was jailed for 8½ years for 24 offences against his sisters Paula, Catherine and Yvonne in the 1970s and 1980s when he was aged between 16 and 24.
His abuse of Catherine began on her ninth birthday and continued, escalating to rape, until she was about 13.
His offences against Paula included rape and indecent assault, and occurred when she was between 14 or 15 and 17 years old. He admitted one count of indecent assault on Yvonne when he was 18 and she was 20.
The abuse occurred against a difficult family background.
Their father Richard Joseph Brennan, built up a successful public hygiene disposal business, but was an alcoholic and sometimes violent to his wife and children.
His wife Máire Brennan struggled with serious mental illness and could be both verbally and physically abusive to her children. She spent long periods in mental health units, leading to some of the children being in care for a time.
In the wake of the sentences of their two brothers, the three Brennan sisters – Yvonne, Paula and Catherine – talked to The Irish Times about life within the Dublin family home, how the abuse occurred and how the atmosphere in the home offered no protection for the sisters from their abusive brothers.
“It was an atmosphere of great fear, massive fear, across all of us,” Paula says. “It was always about appeasing them [parents], keeping the peace, as if we were the adults.”
The girls were expected to do a lot of housework and Paula looked after her younger sisters, leading to her poor school attendance record.
The Brennan family lived fairly comfortably. Encouraged by their parents, several of the children were accomplished singers and Yvonne went on to sing professionally in Ireland and the US.
Paula was “very frightened” of Bernard whom she regarded as an adult.
“He was given so much leeway around being an authoritarian in the house. He would twist a damp tea towel like a piece of rope and whack you if you didn’t do what you were told,” she says.
She was about six or seven when Bernard, aged about 13 or 14, began sexually abusing her.
“The biggest impact for me was on my education, I was afraid to speak; it became that I could not voice anything,” Paula says.
The abuse often happened late at night when Bernard got into her bed or lifted her out of it and abused her in the room he shared with his younger brothers.
His abuse of Yvonne began when she was 12 and followed a similar pattern. She believes she was “groomed”, including exposure to a pornographic video, and described Richard watching “like a voyeur” while Bernard was abusing her.
Paula was “overjoyed” when Bernard married young and left the family home but Richard’s “relentless” abuse of her continued until she was about 17.
Catherine decided to tell her best friend Michelle Goggins about the abuse at the hands of Richard after a sex education class in 1984. Goggins encouraged her to report it, saying adults would stop it, and accompanied her to the home of a nurse linked with her school.
That evening, the head nun at her school rang her father to inform him of her disclosure and Catherine recalled her parents “screaming and roaring”. The next day, her mother “called me every name”.
“She told me I was lying, these things happen in families,” says Catherine.
Her parents took no action but family therapy meetings, facilitated by St John of God’s, were organised later in 1984 following a referral by Dublin’s Meath hospital when it could not diagnose a source of Catherine’s lower limb disorder.
The meeting notes recorded how her father dismissed Richard’s abuse of her as “just sexual curiosity”.
[ Brothers’ abuse of sisters was hidden in Dublin family for yearsOpens in new window ]
Their mother ultimately walked out of a meeting, hauling Catherine with her; the rest of the family followed.
Her parents discontinued the meetings.
Her younger sister Catherine was treated very badly at home afterwards, Paula says.
“I think I took the attitude: ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to be treated like that.’ I really wish I had the courage she had to speak out, but I did not,” says Paula.
Yvonne felt “really sad for Catherine” and said she has a sense of guilt about not speaking up herself but feared “we would be beaten to within an inch of our lives”.
There were some grounds for that. When a “kind” teacher previously asked her how she got lash marks on her back, arms and legs, she “stayed very quiet” and did not reveal her mother lashed her with a stick. The teacher gave her a hug but the school took no action.
Catherine, now a licensed clinical social worker, said their father had a history of “overreacting to situations” and she has vivid memories of him inflicting two “horrendous” beatings on her with his fists, the first when she was just six years of age.
“There was such fear of stepping out of line,” says Catherine.
Paula told Catherine in the 1990s she too was abused by Richard but was unable to tell her parents. Yvonne told her sisters of being abused about 2012, when Catherine wrote to the organisers of a youth group in Georgia for whom Richard was working, expressing safeguarding concerns.
All three sisters reported their brothers’ abuse to the Garda in 2019.
Richard, having been ordained a priest in 1989, had moved to the US but left the priesthood in 1992 after meeting his wife Bridget.
Other family members also emigrated to the US, including the parents. The children’s father, who had stopped drinking after receiving treatment in Ireland, ran a successful pawnbroking business there.
After their parents learned in 2012 that Richard’s abuse extended beyond her, her father “cried on the phone to me, apologising profusely for his inaction” over her 1984 disclosure, Catherine says. As a result, she felt able to care for him up to his death just a year later.
Her mother’s response was different. After Richard resigned his role with the youth group in Georgia and moved to Montana, claiming Catherine was “yet again” trying to destroy his life, her mother did not speak to her for months, she says.
Later, while her mother would not discuss not believing her in 1984, she was “gentler and kinder” and “behaved in a way that suggested she was sorry”. Both parents were wonderful grandparents, she added.
It was a “hard pill to swallow” when, two days before her death in 2014, her mother called Richard and told him: “Your sisters forgive you.”
Catherine avoided her brother when he came to the house because their mother wanted to see him before she died.
Paula felt able to forgive her father before he died but said she struggles with repressed feelings of anger towards her mother over her reaction to the disclosures of abuse.
“It was about reputation; it was never about us,” she says.
A year after their mother’s death, the sisters’ beloved younger brother Eamonn died by suicide and their sister Sinéad, who suffered health issues over many years, died in 2021.
All three are unhappy with the eight-year sentence imposed on Richard and want the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) to bring an “undue leniency” appeal.
“The sentence is an insult – it sends the wrong message to survivors and especially to offenders,” says Catherine.
“It amounts to saying it doesn’t matter how many times, or how many people, you rape. It’s not good enough. Women’s lives matter.”
