Sir, – The late Fr Patrick Aloysius Flood is one of the group of Spiritan priests described as being responsible for a paedophile “reign of terror” at Willow Park School and Blackrock College in and around the 1970s. It has barely been mentioned that in 1977 Fr Flood was promoted. He was appointed principal of the secondary school at St Michael’s College, also under the Spiritans’ patronage and situated a mile or so away on Ailesbury Road. He remained in that post for six years before returning to Blackrock College as dean of boarders in 1983. These details are set out in his Order’s online publication Irish Spiritans Remembered II.
Questions arise over his move to St Michael’s. Was there a formal appointment process with interviews and references? If so, given the patronage structure of these schools, what was the involvement of the Spiritan colleagues who knew him from the Blackrock campus? If there was no such process, how was the appointment decided? Perhaps the most urgent question is financial: was the post publicly funded? The title of principal, if properly used, would seem to suggest a salaried appointment recognised as such by the Department of Education.
I remember Fr Flood well, having been a pupil at St Michael’s (primary and secondary) from 1974 to 1982. Looking back, I have often wondered why I became bitterly unhappy at that school. My memories are not of abuse, but of something less tangible: a pervasive sense of emptiness, spiritual as well as intellectual. I long believed that the problems were in my own mind, or in the cultural confusion of my generation and social class. Now I must think again, pondering the corrupting effects of hypocrisy and cynicism.
After a career of 30 years in higher education, I can see one practical lesson to take away from all this.
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Send your children to an ordinary school near your home, a school with no fees, no exclusivity, no manicured grounds, no claim to a special ethos or charism, and no stained-glass window in the entrance hall of the Archangel Michael triumphing over the Devil. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL CLARKE,
Galway.
Sir, – To suggest that Blackrock College was a middle-class school is a perfect illustration of the problem of how we think about class in Ireland. It wasn’t. Few people from middle-class backgrounds could afford to go there.
For the term “middle” class to have any meaning it has to be in the middle of something. There has to be a class below it and one above it, conveniently a lower and an upper class, otherwise the term is meaningless.
We are good in Ireland at talking about the lower and middle classes but are remarkably silent on the upper class, that is, those who were rich enough to be able to send their children to private schools like Blackrock. – Yours, etc,
CIARAN McCULLAGH,
Bishopstown,
Cork.