Chapter 7 — Artane

Sexual abuse

Two complainants gave evidence of sexual abuse by laymen who were not staff members of Artane. The incidents were not disputed by the Congregation and were used in their Phase III Submissions to illustrate the willingness of the Congregation to deal with issues of sexual abuse.

The first incident happened in the 1960s and involved a man who was himself a former resident of Artane. He approached the complainant returning from Croke Park and offered him a cigarette. They were sitting on the grass chatting when the man put his hand up the boy’s shorts. The man said to him: ‘do you want me to tell the Brother you were smoking or are you going to let me play with you?’ The witness said that he was more frightened of the Brothers than this man, so he let him touch him. In the end, he remembers jumping up and running the rest of the way back to the School, crying. When asked why he was crying by the Brother on yard duty, he said that his team had lost the match.

The next Sunday, a Brother told the boy that a visitor wanted to take him out for the day but, when the boy saw that it was the same man, he refused to go. The Brother called him into his office and asked him why he didn’t want to go. The complainant said he broke down and told the Brother everything. ‘Before I was finished the conversation, the police were outside and took the man away’.

In their responding statement, the Christian Brothers refer to this incident briefly: The Complainant refers to an incident of abuse by a former resident whilst he was returning from a trip to Croke Park ... I cannot comment on the allegation of sexual abuse committed by the outsider other than to say that boys were closely supervised at all times to try to ensure that something like this did not happen. It is noteworthy that the Complainant was in a position to complain about the alleged abuse by the former resident and that the authorities in Artane took appropriate action.

At the Phase III hearing, the implications of this case were discussed with reference to the point that this lay person had been handed over to the Gardaí, whereas the same had not occurred with offending Brothers. It emerged then for the first time that there appeared to be some dispute as to the circumstances of the case, in that Br Reynolds, the Christian Brothers’ spokesman, suggested that the case was not reported as an instance of sexual abuse but rather as one of absconding, and that it involved two boys who failed to return from a trip to Croke Park and were seen going into the man’s house. He said that it subsequently emerged that they had been sexually abused. Such an alternative case does not appear to be based on any evidence available to the Committee, and so it is treated as an accepted instance of sexual abuse known to the Artane authorities. In those circumstances, the difference in the handling of this complaint against a layman as compared with offending Brothers is indeed striking.

This point was made even more clearly in the following case, which was raised at an oral hearing of the Investigation Committee. In this second case of abuse by a layman, another complainant described an incident with a man who was a friend of the Brothers, and he took the witness and two other boys on a weekend trip to Northern Ireland. They all slept in the same room, which had four beds. When they were in bed, the boys would not stop giggling and the man ordered the witness to get into his (the man’s) bed. The man ‘started to rub me and put his hand on my genitals. He got me to put my hand on his genitals and I was feeling really scared, I didn’t know what to do’. He did not know whether the other two boys could see what was going on but he presumed they could. He said that he masturbated the man and that he felt disgusted afterwards. The following morning he had a shower and recalled trying to ‘scrub the skin off my body’.

When the complainant got back to Artane, he told his older brother who was also a pupil there what had happened. He thinks that his brother said it to someone else, because he was brought in front of a senior Brother in the School. He recalled two men coming in to the Brother’s office and was told they were Gardaí. He told the full story of the abuse he had experienced to the Gardaí.

When he left the office and was making his way over to the dormitory, he got ‘an awful hiding’. He said that this beating was administered by another Brother who had been present during his interview with the Gardaí. He never saw the man around Artane after that.

In their response, the Congregation confirmed that a lay person who had been accused by some boys of sexual abuse was told to stay away from the School and the matter was reported to the Gardaí. The statement went on to say: However, this incident does demonstrate that the Congregation took any complaints of sexual abuse very seriously indeed, reported them to the Gardaí and took all necessary steps to prevent the alleged perpetrator from having any contact with the boys in the future.

Two Christian Brothers recalled this incident, one of whom said that it had been his idea to allow the man into the School. He said that the man had offered to help out by driving the boys on outings. He admitted that it was a bad decision on his part to allow this. He believed that the Resident Manager had called in the Gardaí when the allegation was reported to him.

One of the Brothers remembered another incident. He said that two boys came to him to talk it over when the matter was being investigated by the Gardaí. The older boy came to him first, and told him that he was one of the boys who had been abused by the man. He then told him that he himself was abusing the younger boys but that had now stopped. The Brother told the Investigation Committee that this came as a big shock to him, as he had thought him to be a very decent boy. He said that that was the only incident he encountered in Artane of boys abusing other boys. He did not believe the boy was making a complaint as such. He believed that he just wanted to talk to somebody about it. The Brother did not do anything further in the matter and did not think that the boy should be punished.

This Brother recalled a further incident, where he believed a man was behaving inappropriately with the boys. He said that this particular man used to visit the School and talk with the boys. He had the nickname of ‘Dirty Hairy Sixpence’. He would put a sixpence into his trousers pocket and invite the boys to retrieve it, which involved them in inappropriate touching of the man. The Brother said that he had received no complaints about this man during his time in Artane, and that it was only now, because of an allegation in which another Brother was referred to as ‘Sixpence’, that he realised what the man had been doing.

This Brother confirmed that ‘Sixpence’ used to come freely into the School and talk with the boys. When asked whether this was a regular occurrence, he said that ‘Well, he did’. When asked whether it struck him as odd that a man could be allowed to enter the School freely, he said, ‘No, it never crossed my mind it just—no, I didn’t no’.

At the Phase III hearings, Br Reynolds was not able to explain why the Gardaí had been called in the case of a layman, but had not been called in relation to sexual abuse by Brothers. He said that the reluctance to involve the Gardaí was ‘common practice right across society’.

These cases undermine the position adopted by the Congregation in relation to sexual abuse, namely that it was seen as a moral failing rather than criminal behaviour on the part of the Brother and was dealt with as such. No ambiguity existed in the case of lay offenders. To assert, as the Congregation has done, that it was ignorant of the full implications of sexual abuse of children is not consistent with its response to these lay offenders. The Congregation was aware of the criminal nature of this conduct and took swift and effective action, which makes its failure to do so in the case of its own brethren all the more difficult to excuse.