Chapter 14 — St. Joseph’s Kilkenny

Sexual abuse incident of 1954

Dr McCabe continued to question the child and asked her whether anyone had pulled down her knickers. She said her mother had done it once to punish her, and then she said Mr Jacobs had done it to her. The girl then gave Dr McCabe a detailed description of what ensued, the particulars of which need not be included in this report. It is sufficient to say that the story told by the child showed that the behaviour of the employee was not a casual or chance encounter, but was the result of careful preparation by a calculating child abuser. The innocence of the child in sexual matters was apparent from her account.

Dr McCabe then questioned the two girls mentioned. They both described very similar conduct by Mr Jacobs. One child said that she had told Sr Stella5 ‘who put her to bed and shut the door’.

Dr McCabe then asked the Resident Manager about Mr Jacobs and was told that he was ‘a marvellous man and the mainstay of the Institution’, who had been employed by ‘Four Reverend Mothers’ over a period of 30 years. He was a married man with a large family.

Dr McCabe told the Resident Manager about the child [BB] who had reported the matter to Sr Stella: The Resident Manager told me that she was on holidays when that had happened but on her return she heard all about it but was inclined to disbelieve it “as these children are all so well informed before they come into the school and often tell a lot of lies that it is difficult to believe them”. When I mentioned XX and AA she was really shocked. I asked her why when she had heard about BB why she had not informed the Department and ask them to investigate the matter. She told me really she thought the child was imagining it.

A different account appeared in a statement prepared by the Sister in question, Sr Stella, which was taken after Dr McCabe’s investigations. She said that she observed a child in tears after coming from the School where Mr Jacobs had given her sweets. According to this account, the Sister asked the child whether anything had happened in the School, and the child said no, that she had only gone in to Mr Jacobs for sweets.

There was no explanation offered for the account given by Sr Tova to Dr McCabe, which corroborated the child’s story that she had told Sr Stella what had happened.

Dr McCabe asked to interview the two girls for whom the application to transfer was made, and she interviewed the older of the two, who was almost 16 years old and who was working in the laundry to keep her away from the other children. She could not elicit any information from her.

Dr McCabe then discovered that the Resident Manager had already transferred the second girl to a reformatory in Limerick. This child had told one of the Sisters that her uncles had been interfering with her before she had come to St Joseph’s. In an account of this, the nun in question stated: Then I discovered that for two years prior to her coming here she had on countless occasions indulged in sexuality with her two uncles and with other boys. We got none of those details about her when she was being committed to the school. I reported the matter immediately to Mother Vera6 who took action.

This was the child who had been described as a ‘bad type’. The Reverend Mother had telephoned the Good Shepherd Convent, a girls’ reformatory in Limerick, and had asked that the child be taken immediately. Dr McCabe advised the Resident Manager that what she had done was illegal and she had no authority to transfer the child without Departmental permission.

On receipt of Dr McCabe’s report, a number of Department officials met and made the following proposals: (1)Dr McCabe was asked to visit Kilkenny and confer with the local parish priest or administrator who might wish to bring it to the attention of the Bishop. (2)The Resident Manager was to be advised to dispense with the services of the painter with least possible delay. (3)To advise the Resident Manager to immediately request the return of the child who had been transferred to St Joseph’s in Limerick without sanction.

The memorandum setting out these proposals went on to state: When these matters were dealt with and a further report from Dr McCabe received after her interview with the ecclesiastical authorities, the question of the transfer or the disposal otherwise of the two girls can be considered.

Statements were taken from three of the Sisters in charge of the group about the type of immoral conduct they observed over the period leading up to the investigation by Dr McCabe in November 1954. It appeared that, over a period of six months, these Sisters had noticed changes in the behaviour of some of the children. In May 1954, one Sister had observed some of the little children out of their beds at night without their night dresses on. The instigator appeared to be an ‘older’ child, who was eight years old. She reported the matter to her superiors and to a priest. The children were punished, and were given stern lectures, and matters appeared to settle down in that dormitory.

Nothing further happened until the next August, when she discovered two children had been sleeping together and, a fortnight later, heard a child refer to two girls ‘going out with each other’. At this point, she questioned the children closely, and discovered that one of the children had been sexually abused by her uncles before coming to St Joseph’s.

Sr Tova then took up the story. She said that, as soon as she discovered the child’s sexual history, she arranged for two Sisters to accompany her to Limerick, and wrote to the Department for sanction for that transfer, and for the transfer of an older girl to St Anne’s, Kilmacud. This precipitated Dr McCabe’s investigation and the revelations about Mr Jacobs, which she confirmed came as a great shock, as he had been working in the School for 30 years and ‘no-one had ever suspected him’.

When speaking to Sr Tova, Dr McCabe dismissed the behaviour of the other children as childish playing and did not think it merited any further action. The Sisters, however, wanted all the children concerned transferred out of St Joseph’s. A few days after Dr McCabe’s visit, one of the children was found ‘doing an immoral act in the playground before young children’, and this confirmed the Sisters in their view that all of the children involved should be transferred out of St Joseph’s.