Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse: The investigation committee of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was told yesterday that a boy, prevented from attending Pope John Paul's Mass in Limerick in September 1979, was raped by the brother left in charge of him.
Father Patrick Pierce, manager in 1975-91 of St Joseph's Industrial School, Ferryhouse, Co Tipperary, told the committee the boy had not been allowed accompany his colleagues to the Pope's Mass as punishment for absconding. The brother who raped him had been a prefect at the school and volunteered to stay back with the boy.Father Pierce, who was recalling that in November 1979 he first learned about the abuse of boys at St Joseph's by "Brother X", became upset while giving his evidence. "Little did we know we were living with an abuser," he said, and "in the very unit \ younger children would be better protected."
He recalled how that night he had left some staff home, as was the practice, when he decided to drive around to see whether there might be any sign of two boys who had absconded that day. They were from the south, and he headed in that direction. Six or seven miles farther on he found them. They had thumbed him for a lift.
They got in the car. He asked why they had run away. The boy in the front seat said they had been beaten up, and Father Pierce responded along the lines of "Pull the other one". He noticed the front-seat boy went silent, then broke down "and said Brother X was at him".
Father Pierce recalled "immediate impact". There was silence until they got back to the school. He took the boy to his office, cautioned him as to the seriousness of what he was saying, and they talked more. He suggested to Father Pierce that another boy could back up what he said.
The second boy was brought down from a dormitory. It was he who had been raped by Brother X while the rest attended the Pope's Mass in Limerick. Both boys "unfolded a most horrific story of what had been happening to them". They agreed to face X with their allegations.
Father Pierce interviewed X the next day. He denied the allegations at first, then, when told the boys were willing to confront him, backed down.
He was confined to his quarters and removed from the school the next day. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Dublin. Three weeks later he was returned to his own home and later was dismissed from the Rosminian congregation.
The Rosminians' Irish provincial at the time was closely involved in all decisions concerning the case. Father Pierce reported it to the Department of Education, informed X's local parish of what had occurred, as well as a judge at the Children's Court in Dublin which X had been known to attend regularly prior to his joining the Rosminians.
Gardaí were not told then. "I have to honestly say I didn't know about reporting to the gardaí. I probably should have," Father Pierce said.
However, when the Conference of Religious of Ireland issued guidelines on dealing with sex abuse cases in the early 1990s, he then reported the case to a Garda superintendent in Clonmel. X was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to nine years' imprisonment, three suspended.
Father Pierce recalled that, although one of the boys said in court he had forgiven X, he (Father Pierce) still found this difficult. He had visited others in the prison where X is detained, "but I have never been able to bring myself to see him".
© The Irish Times
Five-month jail term for sexual abuse - By Aodhan O'Faolain
ReplyDeleteA man in his 70s was jailed for five months after he admitted sexually abusing a 15-year-old pupil at a Co Tipperary industrial school in the mid- 1970s. The man pleaded guilty at a sitting of Clonmel District Court to three acts of gross indecency against a male at St Joseph's Ferryhouse, Waterford Road, Clonmel, and at a location between Clonmel and Waterford at dates unknown in 1976.
Sgt Liam Corcoran told the court that he had reason to interview the defendant in June 2000 following an investigation into certain events that took place at Ferryhouse.
© The Irish Times
Priest recalls beatings he saw
ReplyDeletePatsy McGarry
A priest, who was himself resident as a child at Upton industrial school, recalled the punishment regime there as somewhat more benign when he arrived in 1953 to what it became later.
Addressing the investigation committee, Father Michael O'Shea recalled being "really traumatised" by beatings he had witnessed there.
He remembered one incident where a Rosminian brother beat a number of boys with a strap "across the behind as many as 20 times each". Eventually a senior boy shouted "that's enough", and invited the brother to remove his collar "and take me on". The brother stopped, more from exhaustion than anything else.
He attributed the severity of some regimes at Upton to the type of men who were prefects or managed the school. The milder, more educated and cultured the man, the less abusive the regime. He was never aware of any sexual abuse at Upton.
Father O'Shea, a Rosminian priest, is currently a chaplain to the maximum security women's prison at Bedford Hills, New York. Born in 1944 at Doon, near Sneem Co Kerry, his mother died after giving birth to twin girls in 1947. His father could not cope with eight young children, so the five older ones were put into care. The youngest three were raised by relatives.
At the age of three, he was taken into an orphanage in Killarney, and at nine he was admitted to Upton in 1953. In 1956, at Rosminian expense, he was given a secondary education at their school in Omeath.
He stayed at Upton and the family home in Kerry during holidays. In 1961 he entered the congregation's Kilmurray novitiate. Later, when a prefect at the Rosminian industrial school in Ferryhouse, Co Tipperary, he "threw the strap into the River Suir".
At the afternoon session yesterday, Judge Seán Ryan, chairman of the commission, apologised to Mr Michael O'Brien who, he said, was "inadvertently included" in comments he (the judge) made following disruptions at hearings on September 6th last. Mr O'Brien, a former mayor of Clonmel, was a resident at Ferryhouse in the 1940s.