A table from the report of the scoping inquiry into sexual abuse at schools run by religious orders ranked schools by the number of allegations made against them and the number of alleged abusers. Willow Park, the junior school for Blackrock College was at the top, with 130 allegations against 24 alleged abusers. Blackrock College was joint 5th with 55 allegations against 13 abusers. Another Spiritan school, Rockwell College, came forth with 60 allegations against 18 abusers.
It was a grim inversion of the so-called school feeder tables we are familiar with, recording levels of progression to university, in which schools such as Blackrock always feature prominently.
I arrived at Blackrock College in 1979 as a fifth-year boarder having come from a sister school in Nairobi. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. But I studied, played rugby — enthusiastically if not very well — and went on to university. I also made some lifelong friends.
It was only in the years after school that people began to talk more openly about what had gone on, particularly in Willow Park
It was a joyless enough place, but I had no sense of the evil that was abroad, other than the odd comment someone might make about a teacher or a priest. Most of them related to my fellow pupils’ time at Willow Park. With hindsight, there was no shortage of clues.
It was only in the years after school that people began to talk more openly about what had gone on, particularly in Willow Park. The anecdotes were often cloaked in humour and shared after a few drinks. It is easy to connect this openness with what was happening in Ireland at the time as scandal after scandal eroded the Catholic Church’s authority and power. What seemed almost inevitable in 1980 was viewed as aberrant in 2000. People began to believe they would be believed.
The dam well and truly burst in November 2022 when Mark and David Ryan, two former pupils, spoke about the abuse they were subjected to at Blackrock in an RTÉ radio documentary, Blackrock Boys. Their bravery led to many other past pupils coming forward publicly for the first time. Some of them have spoken in recent days.
It is an open question as to whether the work of Restore Together, combined with the impact of the Ryan brothers’ decision to talk publicly contributed to the large number of former Blackrock pupils who have come forward
Before the Ryan brothers told their stories, a group of past pupils had already been engaging with the school. In spring 2021 a support group, Restore Together, was established with support from the past pupils’ union to advocate on the part of survivors for a restorative justice approach to addressing what happened including a redress scheme. It covers all the Spiritan schools and 290 people have made complaints against 49 Spiritan clergy and 12 lay members of staff
It is an open question as to whether the work of Restore Together, combined with the impact of the Ryan brothers’ decision to talk publicly contributed to the large number of former Blackrock pupils who have come forward, compared to other schools, and spoke to the scoping inquiry.
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Did the network of wealth and privilege that attaches to having attended a school like Blackrock play a part too in making it easier for survivors to make the difficult decision to speak up and hold the school to account? There will be answers of a sort to this question in time.
The scoping inquiry has said that it believes that further allegations of sexual abuse will emerge post the publication of its report and the discussion that will ensue, as the Government proceeds to set up a Commission of Inquiry and presumably a redress scheme. They predict the final tally will exceed the numbers recorded in their report, which are based on the figures reported to them by religious orders.
The CSO figures suggest, according to the scoping report, that among people aged 35 years and older, some 15,300 men and 26,000 women are estimated to have experienced sexual violence as a child in a school
They have several reasons for taking this view — the first being the high level of underreporting of abuse generally, and secondly a 2022 report from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) which found low levels of reporting of sexual violence, including sexual violence experienced in childhood, particularly among men. The CSO figures suggest, according to the scoping report, that among people aged 35 years and older, some 15,300 men and 26,000 women are estimated to have experienced sexual violence as a child in a school.
It will be telling if Blackrock College remains an outlier in terms of the level of abuse when the commission finishes its work. If it does, then all those associated with the school will have to confront the notion that there was something unusually cruel about the Spiritans and the institutions they ran.