Chapter 2 — Upton

Sexual activity amongst the boys: documented cases

The importance of the court cases was clear to the Upton authorities and beyond. Writing to Fr Orsino in Rome on 20th October 1936 about his brother, Fr Giuseppe, the Resident Manager, Fr Gerodi,53 described how the Manager was detained on urgent business: Fr Giuseppe was unable to be away from Upton, owing to a matter which had troubled him much for several weeks and during last week he had to be on call on the telephone ... Some ex-Upton boys got into very serious trouble, and there was very great danger that the reputation of the School would suffer.

That appeared to be the end of the matter, in the eyes of the Department, until another case involving a former Upton boy came to the attention of the Gardaí in Cork in 1944.

The Inspectors considered the supervision as described to them to be satisfactory, while acknowledging the difficulty of dealing with the problem, and the only step they took was verbal exhortation as to supervision. No new measures were put in place, yet the Minister was able to inform the Attorney General that he was satisfied that everything possible was ‘now’ being done to deal with the problem. The School authorities were concerned about the ‘very great danger’ to the reputation of the School.

Alarming evidence of more extensive sexual activity among the boys at Upton came to light in August 1944. A former resident of the School, who had been detained there from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, was arrested and charged with larceny. The boy had been released early from Upton on licence to a farmer and was considered very troublesome. He was convicted and sentenced to two years’ detention in Daingean Reformatory in 1944.

The boy was medically examined while he was in custody, and he was found to be suffering from venereal disease. He admitted that, while he was resident in Upton, he had engaged in anal intercourse with other boys on several occasions, and he made a statement to the Gardaí in which he named seven other boys with whom he had engaged in such acts, one of whom had died in the intervening period. The Gardaí interviewed the six boys, of whom all but two denied the allegations.

In their statements, the boys who admitted such sexual activity with each other gave explicit details of the acts, which took place in a number of locations such as the kitchen attached to the infirmary, the farm, water closets, the dormitory and the infirmary. One of the boys complained in his statement that he had been anally raped on approximately 10 occasions during his time there. He said that he told one of the Brothers what this boy was doing to him but, when the matter was reported to the Resident Manager, Fr Fabiano, the latter beat him. This boy named five other boys with whom he had committed these acts.

The two boys who had made admissions had been discharged from the School on the expiration of their detention orders and were residing with their parents. The prosecuting authorities decided that they, together with the first boy, who was in Daingean, should be charged, and that the remaining boys who had denied the allegations were not to be prosecuted.

The authorities at the School did not relish the prospect of another trial of sex charges involving boys from Upton, and they went to work to try to prevent the prosecution going ahead. When the local State Solicitor was at the District Court in Cork, he was approached by a senior member of the Order, who pointed out to him that the offences took place a long time ago when the boys were very young. He said that the boy in Daingean was to blame for the incidents, that the other boys ‘did not realise what they were doing’ and that they had been punished accordingly at the School and were now leading good lives. He specifically asked the State Solicitor ‘that no prosecution should be taken’.

The Resident Manager of Upton, Fr Fabiano, followed up this representation with a letter to the State Solicitor in 1944. He stated that the School had been aware of sexual activity amongst the boys in question, and had dealt with the two boys at that time who ‘afterwards became very good’. He impressed upon the State Solicitor that no good would be derived from prosecuting the two boys who had now changed their ways and were now upright citizens. He said: We believe that we have attained our object when we make of these boys upright law abiding citizens, but it is now unjust to draw into the limelight the sins of their youth or perhaps I should say misdemeanours as they may not have been sins at all.

Fr Fabiano took a benign view: I wonder if the law in this case is being interpreted rightly or if the name attributed to the crime of adults can rightly be applied to children who often may not know that they are breaking the law of God let alone the law of the State.

In praise of the children, he asserted that they ‘are good normal children perhaps better than the average and have a right to their good name’.

These efforts proved successful, and the State Solicitor recommended that the three boys should not be prosecuted, and the Attorney General agreed. The reasons were, first, that the boy at the centre of the allegations was already serving a two-year sentence of detention at Daingean, and it was felt that no benefit would be derived from a further prosecution. Secondly, with regard to the other two boys, it was felt that, having considered all the circumstances of the case, no prosecutions should be taken. Each of these reasons existed at the time when the boys were charged, and the only new development was the opposition of the Upton authorities to a prosecution.

There could have been strong arguments put forward for not proceeding with this prosecution, but one of the motives of the Manager appears to have been to avoid adverse publicity and ‘very great danger’ to the reputation of the School. The attitude to sex between boys, that he advanced in his letter seeking to stop the case, was very different from what emerged from their attitude in other cases.

An unwelcome consequence of this Garda investigation for the School management was the renewed attention of the Department of Education. The Superintendent of Bandon Gardaí informed the Inspector of the Department of Education in 1944 of the charges being brought against the three boys. An internal enquiry was mooted by the Department of Education, but it was decided that there was no point in writing to the Resident Manager of Upton to ask him ‘to explain how these acts went undetected until it had been proved that they took place’, i.e. until after the court cases. Such an enquiry never went ahead, presumably because there were no prosecutions.

The Department was unsure as to how it should deal with the situation, but eventually decided almost two months later to write to the Resident Manager to express the ‘Minister’s grave concern at the continued prevalence of this serious vice in the School’. This the Inspector of Industrial Schools duly did, by letter dated early the following year. He expressed in very strong terms his concern on behalf of the Minister of the ‘continued prevalence of sodomy amongst the boys’ in Upton, and he specifically drew attention to the 1936 Special Inspection, whereby the need for tighter supervision of senior boys was stressed to the Resident Manager at the time. The letter also expressed, even more forcefully, the burden on the Minister who, as the regulator of all industrial schools, was placed in a grave predicament when these allegations of sodomy arose. In order to impress upon the Resident Manager the urgency and problem posed by sexual abuse amongst the boys, he threatened that the school certificate would be withdrawn if radical action was not taken to eradicate the problem: The danger that this is so places a burden of the gravest responsibility on the Minister, since it is by virtue of his continued recognition of the School as an industrial school that a steady stream of young boys are sent there under the Children Acts. If it should become clear that this ruinous vice has taken firm root in your school and cannot be eradicated so that boys are exposed to an abnormal degree to the danger of indulging in it, the Minister may feel bound to withdraw his recognition from the School.