Spiritans expect additional survivors to come forward as 233 men allege abuse against 77 Irish priests

The Spiritan congregation says it expects further abuse survivors to come forward after disclosing that 233 men have made allegations of abuse against 77 Irish priests from the religious order throughout Ireland and overseas.

Of that number, 57 men have alleged they were abused on the campus of Blackrock College in Dublin. Since 2004, the congregation has paid out over €5 million in settlements surrounding abuse claims and for support services, with 12 of those settlements made with 12 men in connection with abuse at Blackrock College.

Spiritan provincial Fr Martin Kelly said the congregation, formerly the Holy Ghost Fathers, was continuing to explore new ways of reaching out to those who have been abused and those who had not yet come forward about their abuse. The Spiritans, he said, expect to make a public announcement on this process very shortly.

Two Dublin brothers have spoken of how both were sexually abused by priests at Spiritan-run Blackrock College in the 1970s and how it was 2002 before either became aware of the other’s abuse.

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The grooming and abuse took place at locations including the school library, and at the swimming pool at Willow Park, the junior school to Blackrock. The priest also visited the family home.

[ Dublin brothers relate how both, unknown to the other, were abused by priests at Blackrock College ]

RTÉ documentary

Mark (61) and David (58) Ryan were the subject of Monday evening’s RTÉ Documentary On One radio programme, in which they told of their separate abuse at the hands of Fr Tom O’Byrne and other priests in the school.

Concerns had been raised at the time about Fr O’Byrne with Blackrock College and the priest disappeared for a few months but when he returned the abuse resumed, David said. “He violated my whole body… I was unable to fight him off. It was awful. I was his pawn,” he recalled.

In 2002, David was watching a news bulletin about clerical child sex abuse in Ireland when his father asked him whether “that priest” had ever abused him. David broke down and told his father who then learned that Mark had also been abused. Both former pupils made statements to the Garda.

[ How a cover-up by Spiritans in Ireland led to child abuse in leading Sierra Leone school ]

[ Spiritans reveal 233 boys at secondary schools in Ireland and abroad accused 77 priests of abuse ]

Fr O’Byrne was then 82 and living on the Blackrock campus. In 2003, the Director of Public Prosecutions charged Fr O’Byrne with 37 offences arising from the boys’ abuse. However, the Supreme Court decided in 2007 that as the priest was then 87, and the events referred to had been so far in the past, the case should not proceed.

The Ryan family “never understood that decision”, David said. “It was so, so wrong”, and left him with “complete disgust at the judicial system in Ireland”.

St Mary’s College

Following a civil action initiated by the brothers, a six-figure settlement was agreed in 2003 with the Spiritans, without admission of liability or apology.

The sexual abuse of boys by Spiritan priests first came to public attention in Ireland in March 2009 when Fr Henry Moloney was convicted of abusing Mark Vincent Healy and Paul Daly, who died in June 2011, when both were pupils at St Mary’s College, Rathmines, between 1969 and 1973. Moloney was given a suspended sentence due to ill health and as he was already under strict supervision at the Spiritans’ Kimmage Manor in Dublin. He had previously been sentenced, in 2000, to 18 months’ imprisonment for sexually assaulting two other boys at St Mary’s in the early 1970s. He served 15 months.

In 1973, he was transferred by the Spiritans to their Christ the King College at Bo in Sierra Leone. In 2012, with the assistance of Mr Healy, The Irish Times spoke to men who alleged they had been abused by Moloney at the college.

A second Spiritan priest accused by Mr Healy, Fr Arthur Carragher, died in Canada in January 2011. He taught at St Mary’s in 1969.

A 2012 audit of the Spiritans by the church’s child protection watchdog in Ireland, the National Board for Safeguarding Children, found suspected abusers were often moved by the congregation, either within Ireland or abroad, provoking concern that other survivors had yet to come forward.