Gardai have been informed of the identities of two more swimming coaches against whom allegations of child sex abuse were made during the course of the Murphy inquiry, according to official sources.
The report of the Murphy inquiry, published on Wednesday, noted that two allegations were made against coaches other than former national coaches George Gibney and Derry O'Rourke. The former is now in the United States after charges against him were dismissed on a point of law in 1994, while the latter was jailed for 12 years for sexual and indecent assault on young girl swimmers in January.
Meanwhile, a swimming coach and parent has said she approached the Irish Amateur Swimming Association to voice her concern about an allegation against George Gibney as long ago as the beginning of 1991. She and her family received threats and anonymous phone calls when she continued to raise the issue.
Ms Carol Walsh from Portmarnock, Co Dublin, told RTE's Today programme yesterday that a fellow-coach and former swimmer had told her in December 1990 he had been abused by Mr Gibney. "I was very, very shocked but I didn't disbelieve him," she said.
After the Christmas holidays she had approached a member of the IASA executive and asked the person to investigate the allegation, telling Mr Gibney they "wanted to clear his name."
The official had told Ms Walsh she would be ill-advised to get involved. "I'd lose all the footing I'd gained in swimming and I was in a very good position with the best club in the country and I should think twice about it. She was aware who was spreading these rumours and she'd heard them before."
In the next few months she had followed Mr Gibney, whom she was working closely with at the time, "basically trying to put myself between him and the children."
She had then approached Frank McCann, the chairman of the Leinster branch, who was later convicted of killing his wife and a child they had hoped to adopt. "Again he was not surprised. He had heard the allegations many times before."
McCann, who was the IASA's incoming vice-president, told her "he hoped to f... it wouldn't break" while he was in office. He said there was nothing he could do about the allegations and advised her "to back off and not get involved."
He said: "It would take a group of swimmers who'd been abused to come together and do something about it."
Eventually Ms Walsh went to an official of the Olympic Council of Ireland, who advised her to contact a number of the swimmers who said they had been abused, "get them to group together and then go forward to the police."
That was what Gary O'Toole and the other coach making the allegation had done, and "the rest is history." She said the whole process had taken about 2 1/2 years from the time she heard the first allegation.
Ms Walsh said she had received anonymous phone calls in the middle of the night, and others in which the caller had asked: "How many more people's reputations are you going to ruin?" Another caller had told her he knew the times her children finished school.
Her husband's new car had been damaged while parked outside a swimming pool where she was working. She had lost a job at a pool and "nobody could give me a reason". This had led to one young swimmer she was coaching, who was on the Olympic probables list, being left with nowhere to train.
Her doctor had ordered her to leave the Trojan swimming club because of a stress-related skin disease she was suffering from as a consequence of all this pressure. When she told her children, also club members, that they would have to leave, her 12-year-old son had asked: "Is is over what's happening with the girls, mam?" He then told her about another young girl whose allegations of abuse she had not known about.