A man's 50-year wait for justice ended yesterday on the cold granite courthouse steps in Tullamore, Co Offaly. Inside, a retired schoolteacher, Donal Dunne, had just been sentenced to two years in prison on sex-abuse charges.
As he was being led in handcuffs to prison, a former pupil of his who bore the brunt of his savagery 50 years ago in a Dublin school turned to reporters and said: "I have waited since 1947 for this day."
Behind him, quieter, more reflective, were other former pupil victims of the man the court heard felt little remorse for crimes against boys in schools in Dublin, Kilkenny, Offaly and Longford.
They were the children of other decades, the 1950s and 1960s. They were no longer helpless and had come to witness the man who had caused them so much pain stripped of respectability and freedom.
Dunne, who is close to his 79th birthday, had asked to leave the dock so he could hear what was going on. He was alone as he sat on a chair behind his barrister, Mr William Fennelly.
Across the courtroom from the bespectacled former teacher sat seven men. Two of them, including the Dubliner, had sought court permission to observe proceedings. Two sat with their spouses.
They had come following the publicity generated by the hearing last year when Dunne had pleaded guilty to 17 charges of indecent assault in Cos Offaly and Kilkenny in the 1960s and 1970s.
Det Sgt Michael Dalton, the prosecuting garda, said others had come forward since details of the case were first published. The earliest dealt with abuse in a Dublin school in 1947 and in Longford and in the choir loft of a Longford church between 1957 and 1961.
The victims heard Mr Fennelly outline the medical reports on the defendant, who had been recently diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson's disease.
They fidgeted as Mr Fennelly put forward the mitigating circumstances, saying Dunne had been himself the victim of child sexual abuse.
He had removed himself from the area where he could perpetrate atrocities on boys by teaching in a girls' school and coaching only GAA teams at a senior level. He was a non-smoker and a non-drinker and Dunne would say he was a good teacher.
Dunne, he said, was now thoroughly "disgraced and reviled" but he was seeking to have the sentence suspended because of age and his guilty plea.
But Judge Anthony Kennedy said he had noted the psychiatric reports that Dunne had a long history of paedophilia and had given a very conservative estimate of the number of boys he had molested.
He had taken advantage of the innocence and vulnerability of young boys for his own perverse sexual excitement. It was of very grave concern that he had been involved in the same activity which led to a conviction when he was aged 75.
The psychological reports indicated that he showed little signs of remorse and suggested a high risk of re-offending.
Dunne heard the judge say it seemed to him he had little alternative but to plead guilty.
When he delivered sentence and refused leave to appeal, the victims shook hands. The two women embraced their partners and then one another. They all filed out of the court.
The Dubliner stood on the court steps to see Dunne being led away. Only he would speak openly to reporters and he told of the things which had been done to him by Dunne, a former Christian Brother.
"At last, at last," he said. "I have been trying to track him down all my adult life."
"When I was going to school we were all afraid of him. He was both bad and mad and he used to beat the shit out of me. He kicked me in the stomach," he said.
"He was sexually molesting me one day and I hit him. He beat the pulp out of me and when I went home with a black eye my father said I probably deserved it," he said.
"I was so afraid of him that I used to walk about in my bare feet so I would get a cold and would not have to go to school. He destroyed my life. But this is a good day for me," he said.