Chapter 8 — Letterfrack

Sexual abuse in Letterfrack

Br Anatole told the Committee how his abusive activities began: I suppose it arose out of need for intimacy, my sexuality was very very juvenile, very immature and I had no experience of women of any kind, no experience of contact with women. Out of my need for intimacy and of sexual experience, it gradually developed ...

He said that the abuse generally took place in his bedroom or the wash hall, as he was careful to avoid detection and generally abused children when the other Brothers were away or unlikely to discover him in the act. He regularly used the guise of wrestling with the boys in order to disguise the actual nature of what he was engaged in. He said that he would often initiate the abuse by asking the boys whether they wanted to wrestle. He said that boys would often come to him and ask to wrestle because they wanted the treats he would give them after he had abused them. During these wrestling matches, both he and the boy would be in swimming togs and he would press up against the boy until he, Br Anatole, ejaculated. He felt that the pretence of a wrestling match ‘was an innocuous way of getting some kind of physical contact with another human being’, which would result in an ejaculation.

He told the Committee that he believed that if anyone had discovered him they would not have thought anything untoward was going on: the sight of a Brother and a boy dressed only in their swimming togs wrestling together in a room on their own would not, he thought, have raised any particular concern.

He selected boys mainly on the basis of physical attraction. However, he stated that he had a particular affection for one boy, and that he used to single him out more than the rest. He viewed his relationship with this boy as akin to an affair.

He said that some of the boys were really keen on the wrestling and he would award prizes such as cigarettes and sweets. He tried to dress the activity up as something else but he was certain that the boys knew what he was doing.

He told the Committee that he sexually abused the three boys during the same period, although he doubted whether they were aware of each other’s involvement with him. He accepted that the other boys in the School must have known something amiss was going on.

The abuse did not always take the form of a surreptitious wrestling bout. He used to take one boy, who was 13 or 14 at the time, to his room at night, ostensibly to teach him to read but really to abuse him. He said that the dormitory Brother always gave permission, a matter that Br Iven denied in his evidence. Br Anatole said that he would push up against the boy from behind until he ejaculated. It would normally take between five and ten minutes and, when he was finished with him, he would send him back alone.

Two colleagues of Br Anatole’s gave evidence.

Br Iven served during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He said that he never thought that there was the remotest possibility of Brothers abusing boys. He denied giving Br Anatole permission to take a boy to his room. However, he did say that, if he had been asked, he would not have suspected an ulterior motive.

Br Dondre said that he was not aware of Br Anatole’s activities at the time.

The Congregation did not make any submission on the extent of the abuse committed by Br Anatole. They took issue in their Final Submissions with his evidence, which they described as inherently inconsistent and, ultimately, completely unreliable. Br Anatole had referred to his need for ‘intimacy and sexual experience’ as part of the reason he engaged in sexual abuse of children. The Congregation stated: It is submitted that the personal factors which cause a person to abuse are probably considerably more complex than this evidence would suggest and that the evidence of these individuals does not add a great deal to the overall knowledge of the Committee on this issue.

Although Br Anatole pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting three named individuals, he stated that it took a relatively innocuous form and was adamant that he did not abuse these children in any other way and that he did not abuse any other children. No complainants gave evidence against him during the private hearings, and the Investigation Committee heard no evidence to contest these assertions.

Br Anatole had unsupervised access to boys at most times. Where other Brothers were engaged in sexual activity with boys, it is hardly surprising that he was able to operate without fear of detection.

Br Benoit was working in the O’Brien Institute in the early 1960s when two boys made written statements to the Superior complaining of sexual abuse. The Superior forwarded the statements to the Provincial, requesting that Br Benoit be changed to a day school and that was done. He was subsequently sent to Letterfrack to serve in a senior position in the 1970s.

To explain his being sent to Letterfrack, the Christian Brothers’ Opening Statement commented that the Leadership Team that dealt with the complaints had been replaced in 1966, and only one member of the original team remained on the new team which made the appointment to Letterfrack. The Brother’s personal file ‘appears not to have been consulted when his appointment in Letterfrack was decided upon’. Finally, it says that there were no records on file of complaints in Letterfrack.