Blackrock College abuse: Why did leading voices stay silent for so long?

If Socrates was correct that the unexamined life is not worth living, why did it take so much longer for details of systemic sexual abuse at the supposedly intellectually elevated Blackrock College to come to light than it did at supposedly less favoured institutions run by, say, the Christian Brothers? This is not intended as victim-blaming. I ask myself the same question.

In the 1970s I was a pupil at Willow Park, Blackrock College’s junior school, where many of the worst crimes were being perpetrated. The names in this week’s reports echo down the decades to me.

In maths class, Senan Corry would make his way around the room, groping boys and rubbing his crotch against their buttocks. In religion, Luke McCaffrey would tell eight-year-olds their mothers were going to die soon and go straight to hell

In maths class, Senan Corry would make his way around the room, groping boys and rubbing his crotch against their buttocks. In religion, Luke McCaffrey would tell eight-year-olds their mothers were going to die soon and go straight to hell. Corry I remember as a hulking man with a deep, booming voice, McCaffrey a creepy-crawly figure who lovingly fingered the leather scapulars that you were supposed to wear under your shirt and against your skin. Another man whose name I can’t remember was terrifyingly violent.

To 10-year-old me, these men and other clerics seemed both threatening and ridiculous. But at the same time, as I now know, they were raping my classmates, as were other priests and brothers whose names and blurry faces now loom from news pages, barely remembered shadows from the past.

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Although I didn’t know what was really going on, the paedophilia, misogyny and sadism that I did witness were an education in why not to be a Catholic, a lesson fully absorbed by the time I left the tender care of the Holy Ghost Fathers (now rebranded as Spiritans) at the age of 11. In the many years that followed, I rarely thought about the place. Did I block the memory? I’m not sure, but I’ve come to realise the experience may have marked me more than I allowed myself to think.

Anyway, never having become a “Rock Man”, or a member of any past pupils’ association, I can’t help wondering how none of this seeped out sooner into public view.

It appears that some of the most powerful and allegedly best educated men in the country were unwilling or unable to articulate what they had seen and what they knew

Why did the reckoning, incomplete and unsatisfactory though it was, that befell other orders a quarter of a century ago take so long to reach the doorstep of Blackrock College? This is a question with real consequences for the victims, who are now mostly coming to the end of their working lives. And for the abusers, who are now nearly all dead, having evaded prosecution or conviction, thanks to the efforts of their order. Justice was delayed and denied.

It appears that some of the most powerful and allegedly best-educated men in the country were unwilling or unable to articulate what they had seen and what they knew. They failed in a way their allegedly less fortunate counterparts did not.

The story of the collapse of deference to church authority in Ireland is complex, as Derek Scally’s book, The Best Catholics in the World, lays out. But before Eamonn Casey and Michael Cleary and the groundbreaking documentaries of Mary Raftery and Louis Lentin, there was Cathal Black’s docudrama Our Boys, and Mannix Flynn’s book Nothing to Say, and Paddy Doyle’s memoir The God Squad: raw, personal testimonies of institutional abuse.

In their recent memoirs Walking with Ghosts and We Don’t Know Ourselves, Gabriel Byrne and Fintan O’Toole recall their respective experiences of a Christian Brothers education. In both cases, there is a sense of an apparatus of control that, while immensely powerful in most ways, is ultimately rooted in a fear of an urban working class that, given the opportunity, might just rise up against its oppressors.

This fear would not have been shared by the Holy Ghosts. Media coverage of the Blackrock story has focused on the school’s position over a century and a half as a “bastion” of intergenerational privilege, a conveyor belt of this society’s leaders in business, politics and the professions, a bricks-and-mortar symbol of the concordat between confessional church and conservative state. An article in last Saturday’s Irish Times referred to “the Blackrock omerta”.

It seems telling that Blackrock College’s most visible incarnation in contemporary culture is as the fictionalised Castlerock College, alma mater of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, whose creator, Paul Howard, is no Rock Man

But along with its regiments of bankers and barristers and businessmen, Blackrock has also produced many of the loudest voices of modern Irish society, from pop stars and broadcasters to artists, comedians and journalists, along with TDs of every political stripe. Some of these Rock boys, certainly, made no secret of the fact they detested the place. But whistleblowers have been thin on the ground.

It seems telling that the college’s most visible incarnation in contemporary culture is as the fictionalised Castlerock College, alma mater of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, whose creator, Paul Howard, is no Rock Man.

Ross’s Castlerock was created in the immediate aftermath of the church’s 1990s collapse and the emergence of a post-Catholic landscape. The southside-Dublin snobbery was still there, juiced up now on creatine and Celtic Tiger hubris, but the Catholicism was barely even decorative. What, then, is left now of that world of fingered scapulars and swinging cassocks, of the shame, fear and pain that these priests and brothers inflicted? Did it just disappear without trace from the “ethos” the school promotes?

If you’re looking for art or literature to illuminate any of this, it seems to me the best place to find it is in Bad Day in Blackrock, Kevin Power’s aptly titled 2008 novel about events leading up to and following a killing involving a number of young men from a private Dublin school. Later adapted by Lenny Abrahamson into the film What Richard Did, the novel, variously described by critics as unsettling, uncomfortable and powerful, casts a chilly eye on what happens when a choice is forced between privilege and morality.

Bad Day in Blackrock isn’t about clerical child abuse. Both book and film depict a world that is materially comfortable, apparently decent and slightly banal. But they follow in a long international tradition of literature and cinema that scratches at the veneer of bourgeois respectability to reveal the darkness beneath. (The foremost contemporary exponent is the Norwegian filmmaker Ruben Östlund in films such as The Square and Force Majeure.)

Ireland, a country that effaces class divisions and privilege while simultaneously baking them into state policy on education, health and housing, could surely do with a bit more of that.

If you have been affected by any issue in this article, help and support are available from Pieta (1800-247247, or text help to 51444), Samaritans (116123, or email jo@samaritans.ie or jo@samaritans.org), Connect Counselling (in the Republic of Ireland 1800-477477; in Northern Ireland and Britain 0800-47747777) or the Your Mental Health information service (1800-111888)