St Peter's College, the Wexford boarding school attached to the seminary at the centre of the Ferns report into clerical sex abuse, was "for its time a very liberal place", according to writer Colm Tóibín.
"The food was terrible, and there were a few sadists on the staff, but otherwise it was a good and open environment," said Tóibín, who was a boarder for two years from 1970, when he was 15. He reflected on his time at the school on RTÉ radio's This Week programme yesterday.
The open environment "was further enhanced by the return of Dr Michael Ledwith to become dean of the seminary. He was friendly, easy-going, while maintaining also a great distance."
Unlike Mgr Ledwith, about whom there were "never any rumours", there were "always rumours" about Fr Donal Collins, named in the Ferns report.
Fr Collins, who taught physics, "did not live on the corridor in the new building where all the teaching priests lived but in an older part of the building away from the dormitories".
The young Tóibín did not study physics but all his friends did, and they began to use Fr Collins's room, using the phone and listening to his stereo.
Even though there were rumours about the priest, "having spent so much time in his room I would have thought the idea of his acting on them, of doing anything, was unimaginable."
He realised from the Ferns report that Fr Collins lived in the older building because the then bishop, Dr Donal Herlihy, thought he would be better "far away from the dormitory".
But it was empty at the weekends and isolated and visitors could come and go more or less unseen.
The two priests who complained about Fr Collins originally remained at the college.
"They and others, who knew why he had been removed in 1966, watched then as on his return he became the proud teacher who entered many students in the Young Scientist Exhibition, which gave him excuses to be alone with them and to travel to Dublin with them. He was also the priest in charge of the darkroom."
After Tóibín left, Fr Collins became the priest in charge of swimming and directed the school play.
He could not imagine what it must have been like "as sometime in the 1970s Fr Collins began to exert his authority as a sexual abuser again" - what it must have been like knowing that "along the priests' corridor, across the road in the bishop's palace", there were people "who suspected everything and did nothing".