Former Irish Olympic swimming coach Derry O'Rourke sat impassively as the detailed attacks on his child victims were read out in court.
Calmly he stared into the middle distance as the litany of rape and indecent assault charges against provincial swimming champions, national swimming champions and Olympians was put before him.
O'Rourke, pleading guilty to all charges, will be sentenced today.
One young woman, in a cathartic act, insisted on taking the stand. "Do you need to relive this?" the judge asked. "Yes," she replied. "I need to. I need to get it out."
"He has done things to me and other girls. It is important for me to sit up here and tell him what he has done to me. I've had to live with this man for many years. I trusted him. My parents did. Everyone trusted him. He took away my childhood. He cruelly took it away."
O'Rourke's career provided him with countless opportunities to abuse children. And he took them. National swimming coach between 1976 and 1980; swimming coach for the Moscow games in 1980; national swimming coach between 1991 and 1993; swimming coach for the Barcelona games in 1992. He had indecently assaulted and raped the girl who spoke in court when she was 12 years old. His room, the one where the floats and equipment were kept, the little girls called the Chamber of Horrors. Some were too young to know what it really meant. So they went in.
Discussions of training sessions became terrifying ordeals of indecent assault. Muscle development measurements became groping sessions.
Autogenic training, a smokescreen for failed attempts at hypnosis, became physically painful rape and mental torture.
"Think of lying on a beach," he told them. "Think of going up high in a lift," he said. "Imagine a boy lying beside you on the sand," he encouraged. "He has not shown any remorse," Det Garda Sarah Keane said of the 51-year-old in front of him. "He only pleaded guilty at the last hearing. I have not seen any evidence of remorse."
O'Rourke has sold his house in Leixlip and now lives in rented accommodation in the midlands. He has destroyed lives. He is disgraced. He has a wife and six children. Latterly he has discovered God.
