For nearly a century, generations of proud Blackrock College students and alumni have sung and lived by their school anthem: “Rock boys are we/Our title is our glory”. The anthem placed new lyrics on the melody of a 1906 French military song with a title that now seems more appropriate: Le Rêve Passe, the dream passes.
Revelations of systematic sexual abuse at Blackrock College in Dublin – a feeder school for Irish public life – has shattered many dreams.
Blackrock Boys, Liam O’Brien’s calm, empathetic RTÉ radio documentary, related how in the 1970s priests from the Spiritan – then Holy Ghost – order abused brothers Mark and David Ryan repeatedly between the ages of 12 and 17 years in the school.
The brothers’ legal battle with the Spiritans ended in 2007 when a judicial review found that pursuing the case would cause their alleged abuser – then aged 87 – “quite unnecessary stress and anxiety”.
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As these cases bring forth further abuse survivors, retraumatised by what they are hearing, their former classmates – in reunions and online chat groups – discuss anxiously what they saw, didn’t see and whether they should have taken action in response to rumours about priests and other teachers.
Now in late middle age, they were themselves children and teenagers at the time. Then as now the perpetrators are clear.
But school abusers acted with impunity because they believed others would avert their gaze. They knew that most people beyond the school gates would show priest teachers what the Dublin archdiocese clerical abuse report later dubbed “undue deference”.
Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes trauma as “the loss of self”. Whether a survivor finds themselves again depends hugely on the response they receive when they break their silence.
“If the people whom you naturally turn to for care and protection terrify or reject you,” he writes, “you learn to shut down and ignore what you feel.”
A thread through the past 30 years of Irish clerical abuse revelations has been survivors experiencing what they have perceived as callous and cold-hearted behaviour by those – in particular public servants – they turned to for help.
Irish trauma experts say many public servants – in particular the Garda Síochána, social services and judiciary – have made remarkable progress here in recent years.
But as we look back once more, in the hope of moving forward, we owe our thanks to the latest wave of survivors for providing another piece of Ireland’s abuse puzzle. Their courage and their dignity must be met with every possible support.