This week, The Irish Times invited people who had attended Spiritan and other schools to share their experiences in the wake of revelations of widespread abuse at the order’s schools. They include Willow Park, Blackrock, St Mary’s and St Michaels colleges in Dublin, Rockwell College in Co Tipperary, and others in Ireland and overseas.
We sought responses from people who had experienced abuse themselves, had witnessed it, or had learned only recently that it occurred in their school.
Below is a selection of the responses we received. In these accounts, men who experienced abuse tell what happened to them. We thank all those who responded to the call-out. It is not possible to publish all accounts, but others will follow in the coming days.
Readers may find the accounts upsetting. If you have experienced abuse, you may wish to contact the An Garda Síochána.
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‘I still have PTSD, and probably will have it until I exit the planet’
Aidan Moore, Kenya
Brother Edward Baylor was a psychological, physical and sexual abuser. I witnessed the psychological and physical abuse and was a victim of his sexual abuse. He was a viciously violent paedophile, a most horrible man. Most of what he did to me is still locked in my brain. I can’t seem to take the next step to unlock it despite undergoing post-traumatic stress disorder trauma therapy. I still have PTSD, and probably will have it until I exit the planet.
I am not the only one in this position. I have spoken to some of the other victims who were on Liveline, comparing notes on how we are after publicly telling our stories. It is a mixed bag. I think we are all glad we did it to expose what went on in Willow Park and Blackrock College, but there remains for us in different ways the pain and the anger of what happened to us. I personally was emotionally drained by the end of the week and fighting not to slip into depression. However, I am lucky to have a great therapist, family and friends to help to get me through it. My fellow abused play a huge part in getting through it; who knows better than those who have lived similar experiences?
I believe none of us will have any level of adequate closure unless an independent inquiry is held to give a clear picture of the extent of the abuse and how it was covered up for so long. It is painful to read the continuing press coverage but the story needs to be kept front and centre until a decision is made on whether there will be a full investigation. We live in hope that at some point we will be able to move on from our nightmares.
‘I began to dread being late for fear that he would be waiting for me’
John MacManus, Michigan, US
I attended St Michael’s College in the 1960s, then a preparatory school for Blackrock. Fr Tom O’Byrne was a teacher and he took an active interest in boys’ sports. He regularly took photographs of us playing rugby or competing at athletic events. O’Byrne played the long game of grooming: he started taking an active interest in myself and at least two other boys that I knew of, when we were approximately eight. He presented my parents with a large photograph of me winning an athletic race. He charmed my mother, and she deemed him the “nice father O’Byrne”.
Then came invites to the pictures during the school week. We were glad, of course, to accompany him as it was exciting to get an afternoon off. There were at least two of us each time and therefore it was not too uncomfortable. Then [there were] visits to Merrion Strand, where he would take photographs of us in our bathing suits ... I played rugby after school, and it was often late when I started for home. O’Byrne would wait for me, half hidden in the shadow of a large archway that led to the fields.
There he would stop me and draw me to the side. He offered to help me with any potential rugby injuries with a massage. He would put his arms around me and message my shoulders and then slowly move down my body. I could feel him getting excited as he got closer and closer to my groin. I began to dread being late for fear that he would be waiting for me ...
He moved up to the “big school”, Blackrock, where I went years later. My first maths class was taught by O’Byrne. He walked around the class and stopped behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. He waited for me after the first class and when he had me alone, he offered me private tuition. However, I was now older and stronger, and though disgusted by him I was no longer afraid. I went to the dean and requested a transfer to another class.
‘I was abused in his office’
Anonymous
I was abused by Henry Moloney in junior six, in 1971/2, when I was around 11 in his office, on the grooming pretence of giving me his binoculars for ornithology. Towards Healing [a counselling service] have helped me with my ongoing struggle to heal the ghosts of my “little Auschwitz”. Besides legal action, ongoing free therapy support is far more important for victims/survivors.
‘He asked me to change into my running shorts and vest for a photo’
Dez O’Neill, London
I was a student at St Michael’s School, Ailesbury Road, Dublin, from 1960-1968 and at Blackrock College from 1968-1970. Fr Tom O’Byrne came to teach at St Michael’s in the early 1960s. I wish to state a sexually abusive and inappropriate incident by him towards me around 1962/3 when I was 11 or 12 years old.
Fr O’Byrne was a keen photographer and was often around during sports activities. He asked me to come into school one Saturday morning, when the building was closed, to photograph me as I was the top junior athlete at the previous school sports day. He asked me to bring my running kit of white shorts and vest. He had previously put his arm around me when he was standing beside me watching a rugby match at the school one afternoon. It felt strange that an adult man, not related to me, was doing so in such a way.
On arrival at the school, O’Byrne directed me to the sports hall. O’Byrne asked me to change into my running shorts and vest to take the photos. He pulled over a chair about a metre from me and sat down. He sat forward, putting his elbows on his thighs and his hands on his face, and stared at me. I felt the concentrated way he did it had a darkness about it.
I took off my top clothes and put on my sports vest. I went to remove my bottom clothes and realised my vest was too short to cover my private parts so l looked at him expecting him to respect my privacy. He firmly instructed me to go ahead and change in front of him. This made me feel vulnerable, but as an innocent 11/12-year-old I did as instructed and changed into my shorts while he stared at my private parts.
He took some photos in my sports kit and asked me to change into Tarzan-style leopard-skin pattern briefs, which he had brought. I had to change in front of him again. He took more photos and kept coming up to me, kneeling down and fiddling with the briefs, to make them smaller, as if to better arrange them for the photo. He kept looking into my private parts, which I could see was the reason he kept fiddling with the briefs. This happened quite a few times. He did not touch me. This was highly inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour of a school priest towards a 11/12-year-old school student.
Our class went to a nearby small swimming pool on a few occasions. O’Byrne would get into his swim shorts and join us in the pool. It felt out of place that such an adult would join all the 11-12 boys in the small pool. I noticed how he seemed to enjoy coming into the pool with the young boys ... When we were showering after rugby, O’Byrne liked to watch the boys taking showers. I told my parents of the photo incident, a credit to them that I felt safe to do so and that they believed me. My mother, stared out Fr O’Byrne with contempt the next time she saw him – a brave thing to do at that era – which ensured my experience was an isolated incident.
I wish to encourage others to come forward if they were abused by O’Byrne at St Michael’s in the 1960s. The Church was so revered that they were unchallengeable. That atmosphere was instilled in our parents’ generation.
‘They are memories I’ve repressed for 50 years’
Neil Hogan, Co Cork
I attended Willow Park and Blackrock College through the 1960s and 1970s and suffered sexual abuse and witnessed physical abuse on many occasions. I told my story on the Joe Duffy show and opened up about memories that I had repressed for 50 years. I never realised how traumatic these memories were until I began hearing all the other stories and it started to become quite distressing.
However, I did have to keep reminding myself that, just as good memories have a habit of looking better when looking back, so too can bad memories look worse. But by the end of a long week of harrowing tales of abuse, I began to conclude that some context is missing from this ongoing retrospective and sensationalism seems to be the order of the day. The abuse happened mostly in the 1960s and the 1970s, and we must remember that a degree of physical abuse, or corporal punishment, as it was then known, was legal in our schools and continued to be until 1982. After this, it was allowed in our homes and not criminalised until 2015.
As a child growing up in Ireland at that time, bizarre as it may seem nowadays, a certain amount of physical abuse was accepted as normal. The stories told last week tell of a level of physical abuse that goes far beyond what was acceptable at the time; lines that shouldn’t have been crossed were crossed, but these lines were always indistinct and vague, and self-restraint was the only type of policing that existed.
Looking back from a 21st-century standpoint, these and many other activities and behaviours of the 20th century seem barbaric. Sexual abuse, of course, wasn’t legal but it still existed. As the 2009 Ryan report found, sexual abuse was “endemic” in our residential institutions for boys. But let’s remember that since the 1960s approximately 100,000 boys have been educated at Willow Park and Blackrock College. So far, about 300 students have claimed to have been sexually abused.
I would suspect that if we examined the level of sexual abuse throughout Irish society in general we might get a similar percentage figure. The “Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland” report published in 2002 highlighted that 42 per cent of women and 28 per cent of men disclosed some form of physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime. It doesn’t make what happened in our schools right and I am not condoning it, but abuse existed and continues to exist throughout our society.
So rather than yet another “independent investigation” into the history of one school that will achieve absolutely nothing new, we should accept that those terrible things happened in our past, let the police investigate the cases, compensation be paid where due, and move on by ensuring the necessary protections recommended in the Ryan report are in place to prevent abuse of this nature from happening in the future.
‘No help from any of them’
Desmond Travers, Co Kildare
I was abused in Rockwell when there from 1954-57. Complained to head of [Holy Ghost/Spiritan] order and was interviewed by the vice-principal of the order in 1996. Also gardaí, lawyers and psychiatrist. No help from any of them.
‘He whispered: “You have younger brothers. None of them will be allowed in here if you mention a word of this.”’
Anonymous
I was a boarder at Rockwell College from 1976 to 1981. My parents sent me here and I was told I was one of the privileged few to be sent to such a prestigious school ... I recall arriving in Rockwell and feeling all out of sorts, but I thought to myself: “be brave, your parents are surely right. I am indeed privileged.”
I think that I did my best to adjust by especially getting involved in the sports, playing rugby and so on. I recall going to Confession and confessing that I often masturbated. The priest who later went on to be my abuser took a special interest in how often I did this, what did I think of, who did I think of when I masturbated, and so on. I know now that a red flag should have gone up for me then, but at 12 years of age and in front of one of “God’s holy priests”? Surely he had every right to ask?
It was in the last few weeks, just before we were to break up for the summer, that the same priest asked me to come into his office at the top room in the prefab. All the other students were in their supervised study classrooms. When I walked into his office, he closed the door. He sat me up in his lap. He started to move his leg, bouncing me up and down. He started breathing heavily and panting. He had both my wrists caught. He had me totally restrained. I struggled to break loose, but he had me in a tight bind. I could feel something hard pushing against my posterior. It was his hard-on penis. He then wrapped his left arm around me, still tightly restraining both my arms. He opened my pants and started to fondle my genitals.
I really don’t recall exactly what happened next, but after a short time, I could smell the smell of sperm. He whispered into my ear: “You have three younger brothers. None of them will be allowed in here if you mention a word of this. No one will believe you anyway, because I am a priest.”
He sent me back to the study room. When the 8pm break came and the bell went for our “supper break”, I saw the priest in the hallway. He just gave me a brazen look and then smirked. I was in shock. What had just happened?
Summer break came. I sat down one evening with my parents, my mum and dad. I asked them: “Please don’t send me back to Rockwell.” I was hysterical at one point. I told them what had happened. They would not believe me. My mother, a staunch Catholic, just couldn’t fathom it. Both my mother and father were convinced I was imagining things. Back I went to Rockwell – terrified! I never had another encounter with this priest. However, I became more nervous in myself, unsure. I buried what happened deep inside me and swore to myself that I would never tell a soul. What a shameful thing. I felt so ashamed.
I am now 58. I had a very long learning curve with my alcoholism. So many treatment centres – St John of God’s, Tabor Lodge, Talbot Grove, Bruree. I am happy to say that I am now 15 years sober. One good thing regarding all of this scandal coming out is I realise that I am not the only one. I have never thought of going to the gardaí. I don’t think I will, either. What’s the point? That priest is now dead.
Reading his obituary makes me sick! Should I go legal? Should I sue? That could be such a long, drawn-out process. However, the best thing after going through all of this is, my true faith in Jesus had grown so strong and strong it remains today, and that is worth more than all the money or possessions one can have in this world.
‘I managed to extricate myself unmolested’
Robert Cullen, Co Wexford
In school I did three Aer Lingus Young Scientist prize-winning projects and on one occasion I met Fr [Donal] Collins in his rooms at St Peter’s College Wexford School (I was a boarder), supposedly to discuss the project. I don’t remember how the conversation came to the point where he asked me how much ejaculate I produced. One teaspoonful or more! I remember knowing I was in the wrong place. I managed to extricate myself unmolested. But I remember it to this day. He was found guilty of being a paedophile some years later. I was one of the lucky ones.
‘In the mid- to late-1990s, men with a history of rape and sexual abuse has access to us’
Anonymous
I left Blackrock College in the early 2000s, having been in Willow Park before and had nothing but good memories of my time there. That said, my view of the school is completely tarnished by what I now know about men who taught me and my classmates. Fr [Senan] Corry taught us religion in fourth class and Br Luke McCaffrey assisted us around the time of our Communion.
This was in the mid- to late-1990s and these men would have been in their later years. This did not stop Brother Luke from asking boys into his small shop to change clothes for sports. A man with a long history of rape and sexual abuse of children still somehow had access to us and was actively preying on us. How the school and its management allowed this to happen is an irrecoverable stain on great memories I have of my time there.
Small and insignificant comments made by friends over the years are suddenly profoundly concerning. It seems improbable, bordering on impossible, that these men who were deliberately left alone with children didn’t succeed in their mission to find their next victim, well into the 1990s.
‘Some clergy were allowed to roam free’
Anonymous
In the late 1970s, while I was a boarder at Blackrock College, I felt a sharp pain in my right side that persisted for several hours. I went to see the nurse at the school infirmary. She was not there but one of the brothers, Br Gall, who used to work the dormitories, was. I told him about the pain and he said he would examine me. I was a bit nonplussed as regards what he would know about medical matters, but he proceeded anyway.
He told me he thought I might have appendicitis, and asked me to take off my underwear. “My appendix is above my waist, not below it,” I said. “It’s all connected,” he replied. “Not in me, it’s not!” I said sharply.
That, thankfully, was the end of it. I was treated for appendicitis at a nearby hospital. At that time in Blackrock, it was common to refer jokingly to priests and brothers as being “bent” or “benders”, which were pejorative terms for homosexuals. I think many, if not most, of us were acutely aware, even if we didn’t know why, of some of these men’s proclivities for abuse.
Sadly, there were many of us, particularly, it now seems, in the junior school, Willow Park, who were, perhaps, more vulnerable than others – and some clergy who were allowed to roam free and attack these young, innocent boys.
‘I cried angrily that I would tell my mummy and daddy’
Gregory Toal, Co Dublin
The sexual and physical abuse happened in Willow Park. I was a happy child prior to entering Willow Park and my abuse left me quiet and shy until I went to on art college. I haven’t visited fully what happened, pushing it far away locked behind a door. The harrowing stories of other victims of continuous abuse and the knowledge that it was known and condoned, and such was the power of the Catholic Church, it would never be discovered or told openly.
I was conscripted by Fr Corry to play rugby on the Wednesday half-day break. Two boys collided and Corry proceeded to put his hands down the concussed boys’ shorts. I said out loud: “But father, he was hit in his head, not his pants!” He angrily replied that he “was checking to see if he was all right”.
Fr Stanley, the school principal, had issued an order that no one was to come in late to Mass in the Chapel as it disturbed the sanctity of the Mass – all the boys turned around to see who entered late. I followed that instruction and returned to class, where Fr Corry was teaching religious instruction. I apologised as I entered the full classroom, recounting Fr Stanley’s order, to be met with a full-force slap on my head then my cheek and again and again, which seemed like an eternity. I was sobbing and crying and begging him to stop, still recounting Fr Stanley’s instructions. I suddenly found my mettle from somewhere, shouting and crying angrily that I would tell my mummy and daddy and the gardaí and he won’t be invited to my wedding.
He stopped, turned his back to the class and, grabbing my forearms, roughly whispered through cigarette breath and spittle not to tell my parents, binding my chest and almost suffocating me as he proceeded to put his hand down my shorts and fondle my genitals. I was shocked and disturbed. He told me to shut up and go and sit at my desk. I then avoided him as much as I could.
On another occasion I was conscripted to play rugby by Fr Corry again, and this time I collided with another boy headlong. I was dazed and slowly coming out of the pain. He pounced and sexually assaulted me as he did before. I didn’t tell my parents as I was terrified of Fr Corry.
On another boisterous lunch break prior to my abuse, a fellow pupil and I went climbing trees opposite the tennis club between Willow Park and Blackrock College. I fell and cut my cheek and my friend went to the nurse in Willow, where she proceeded to clean my wound and applied iodine. She called my mum and she came in to collect me. They were chatting about this and that and nurse mentioned that they stopped doing boarders in Willow Park as there were several serious complaints from the parents about incidents with their children. This was in the late 1960s/early 1970s. So the order knew this was going on and did nothing but kept it quiet. I hope by telling what happened to me this can help other pupils [know] that they weren’t alone.
