Chapter 15 — Daingean

Sexual abuse

In his letter to the Provincial at Christmas 1967, Fr Luca wrote: Well the ... case is ended as far as we are ... but not very satisfactorily from the Guards point of view. Mr Johnston is writing a letter now to the Department of Education to be placed in the Files beside the other Document and so I hope will be closed for good and all a rather nasty case. In the last stages of the case I had a call from the Dept. Inspector, Mr McDevitt about it and in passing he referred to the “Document of Accusation”. And then as a by the way he said he didn’t believe it. To which I replied “neither did I” but to make assurance doubly sure we had the allegation investigated by the Gardaí. And they were satisfied, without even a shadow of a doubt, that the whole thing was a malicious concoction. And furthermore, the Attorney General was even stronger in his condemnation of the affair. This took the Inspector a little by surprise for he never dreamt that we would have had it investigated. But he was very pleased to hear that we did take that course of action lest it should ever be brought up again. So when he gets the letter from Mr Johnston he will see that we meant to have every avenue checked & sealed.

Fr Luca was inaccurate in stating that ‘we had the allegation investigated by the Gardaí’. But, in fact, the Gardaí had brought the allegations to Fr Luca and they investigated them as part of the preparation for the criminal trial.

Similarly, when Fr Murphy, who represented the Oblates at the Emergence hearing, told the Commission, ‘... we only find in the records one complaint of sexual abuse. It was brought to the attention of the Gardaí’, he was not correct, as it was the Gardaí who approached the Resident Manager about the matter.

Some light was thrown on the matter by Fr Luca. He wrote in his Statement that the boy’s defence was that he had learned the sexual behaviour in Daingean: When that came to me from the Gardaí it was no longer a school matter, it was outside, the boy was outside and those who brought the story were outside, the Gardaí. So I immediately went to the Provincial and told him what had been said ... Then the Garda who was in charge of the investigation in Dublin got in touch with me to say that he wanted to see this Brother on a particular day, at a particular time.

Following further consultations with the Provincial, a meeting was arranged between Br Ramon and senior counsel, after which counsel told Fr Luca, ‘You needn’t be worried, it’s a false accusation and we have no doubt about that’. At the Garda Station, Fr Luca was shown the file on the case, which he described as ‘putrid’. He added: I would not have thought the Brother had a chance because when you read something and looked at the detail of it you would ask yourself how anyone could compose it ... the minute descriptions and the detail of the thing ... It was a different Brother to the accusation about the 14 year old.26 There had never been any accusations against the second Brother before that, at least I had never heard anything against him. The Gardaí were satisfied, anyway, that it wasn’t true.

Br Ramon’s departure from Daingean in the early 1970s was, it was claimed, in the context of staff changes in preparation for the transfer to Lusk. Older Brothers and those who did not want to continue in the work were gradually moved to new placements.

Br Ramon was neither an older Brother (he was 48 at the time) and, as evidenced by his memorandum to Fr Luca referred to above, he wanted to continue to work in Daingean with ‘the unfortunant boys that passed through St. Conleth’s’. In the light of what is now known about Br Ramon and his time in Daingean, the reason for his transfer to a Scholasticate must be questioned.

When statements of complaint about this Brother were received by the Committee and forwarded to the Oblates, they should have considered these complaints in the light of the information they had about Br Ramon. There was a chance to investigate the behaviour of this Brother as soon as his activities became known in Britain. The allegations surfaced in the mid-1990s, and the Brother is now deceased.

Br Ramon ‘was charged with two specimen offences of “attempted buggery” and “indecent assault” and 16 other offences ...’. After that, he was admitted into the Stroud centre for a full assessment and treatment programme.27 A report on Br Ramon was prepared by his psychiatrists in Stroud and senior members of the Oblate Congregation were consulted in connection with that report.

There is no information about this report, and so it is not known if it covered his time in Daingean, although it would seem extraordinary that a man charged with indecent assault on boys in a residential institution would not have been questioned about the 17 years he spent in a reformatory in Ireland. This is particularly the case when it is now known that an investigation was carried out in Daingean in the late 1960s, by Fr Luca and the Gardaí, into allegations of sexual abuse against Br Ramon.

Following Br Ramon’s conviction on charges of sexually abusing boys, the obvious question arose in the Congregation as to whether he had engaged in such activities in his previous postings, including Daingean. Before he was assigned to a boys’ college in Wales, he had served for 10 years in an emigrants’ hostel in London, where he came under suspicion. In response to a query as to whether any investigation into Br Ramon’s activities in Daingean had taken place in 1997, the Oblates stated in a letter dated 8th May 2008 to the Committee: Fr [Benicio] himself followed up the inquiry referred to in the note of 6 March 1997. He did so by speaking with Fr [Luca]. Fr [Luca] indicated to him that there were no accusations against Br [Ramon], apart for an accusation that had been discounted at the time it occurred as being unfounded Fr [Arador]28 has no recollection of the matter being raised with him. Fr [Javier]29 has no specific recollection of being asked to enquire into the matter, however he is now aware that in [the mid-1960s] an allegation was made against Br [Ramon] which was fully investigated by both An Garda Siochana and the Oblates at the time and was dismissed as unfounded. With that exception, Br [Ramon] had a clean record at St Conleth’s. At the time of our letter dated the 21st of December 2006 we understood that Fr [Javier], as Provincial, did not know of the incident the basis of the accusation in [the mid-1960s], but it appears that he learnt of it around the time of the trial in [the late 1990s].

On the issue of whether Br Ramon ever admitted abusing boys in Daingean, the Congregation stated: We are instructed that Br [Ramon] never admitted nor acknowledged that he had abused boys at St Conleth’s Reformatory at Daingean.

Having regard to the sexual abuse that Br Ramon committed in Wales, the reservations expressed about his time in London, the complainant evidence received by this Committee, together with the investigation in the late 1960s and the recidivist nature of sexual abuse, there must be serious misgivings about Br Ramon’s behaviour in Daingean during his 17 years there.

In his detailed Statement about his time at Daingean, Fr Luca told of another accusation made against a Brother in the late 1960s. He wrote: The boy made the accusation to the priest who was the Chaplain and the Chaplain said to the boy that if he didn’t mind he would call the Superior in on the matter because it needed to be looked into or, he told the boy, he could go to the Superior himself, but the Chaplain said he would have to have the boy’s permission to bring the matter up to a higher authority. The boy said he didn’t want to do it himself but didn’t mind if the Chaplain brought the Superior into it. Then we met together and went through the details of it and, in order to get the details straight, there had to be a bit of cross questioning, because you couldn’t just take the story exactly as it was told, there would be more to it than that. Eventually, he broke down and said it wasn’t true that he was asked by the bigger boys to make the accusation.

It was also strange that Fr Luca did not appear to have taken any action against the boys who initiated the alleged malicious report. If the boy in this case had not retracted his allegation early on, ‘... the next thing would have been that the Brother would have to have been brought into it’.