Chapter 7 — Artane

Sexual abuse

Counsel for the Christian Brothers said that the Congregation did not consider it appropriate to test the credibility of a complainant in circumstances where the fact of abuse had been admitted. The Investigation Committee noted that the Christian Brothers made a statement some months before Br Etienne’s letter, saying: The Complainant makes allegations of abuse of a sexual nature on a number of occasions against [Br Etienne] ... For my own part I find the allegations difficult to accept. In particular where the Complainant alleges that on one occasion the abuse allegedly occurred in a classroom. The classrooms were very public places and I cannot accept that abuse of this nature was conducted in such a location.

This case again raises the issue of the value to the Inquiry of denials by the Congregation in circumstances where it did not make any proper enquiries of the alleged perpetrator. The Congregation’s position was unchanged until the hearing. In the subsequent submission prepared by the Congregation in response to the oral hearings, this case is included in the category of cases not specifically dealt with by the submission: The Congregation’s decision not to refer specifically to such allegations is not to be taken as an admission on its part that such allegations are true or accurate.

Counsel reiterated that a decision was made by the Congregation to send Brothers accused of criminal offences to their own solicitors to be separately represented, that the Congregation did not question these Brothers in relation to the allegations, and that they did not have access to Br Etienne’s statement as prepared through his own solicitors, when the Congregational statement was being prepared. It was a policy decision to have a dividing line in respect of those Brothers who were subject to the possibility of criminal prosecution.

Counsel for the complainant submitted that the approach taken by the Christian Brothers was unhelpful: it seems to have been a case where the approach adopted is: “Prove it. We are not going to go and ask the people who were there what it was like and try and put together our picture of it. We will deny everything; you prove it and we will cross-examine everybody on the minutiae of everything”.

In the circumstances that arose in this and the previous case, the Congregation found itself in an embarrassing position when its rejection of allegations was contradicted by admissions of abuse. This arose because of the view that allegations of abuse against individual Brothers impacted adversely on the Congregation’s charism and that it was therefore appropriate to adopt a position on specific factual issues independent of that of the Brother.

A policy of keeping the individual accused Brother at arm’s length, while at the same time filing a statement of denial in respect of allegations against him, was bound to lead to confusion, misunderstanding and embarrassment for the Congregation, particularly as amending statements were not furnished when new information came to light. Furthermore, the complainant was given the impression that the Congregation would challenge his evidence and he was caused unnecessary anxiety in this regard.

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.