A “fancier than usual” Easter egg is a welcome treat for most children but when Richard Brennan gave one to his 11-year-old sister Catherine, she feared what her older brother might expect in return. She woke that night to find him in her bed sexually assaulting her.
Richard was aged 19 and studying for the priesthood when he began sexually abusing Catherine in their Rathfarnham home in Dublin on her ninth birthday. He put her sitting on her bed, instructed her to remove her underwear and sexually abused her.
She vomited and cried in the bathroom later as she tried to scrub herself clean and was “very confused” because her brother, who came home at weekends from Clonliffe College, was “supposed to be a man of God”.
After Catherine disclosed the abuse at the age of 13, it was dismissed by her father as “just sexual curiosity” while her mother said she was “lying” and being “dramatic”. It continued until she was 14.
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Catherine was unaware until years later that Richard also abused her older sisters Paula and Yvonne, or that an older brother, Bernard, abused her two sisters.
Now aged 67, Bernard Brennan was jailed last month for four-and-a-half years after admitting 11 indecent assault offences against Yvonne Crist and Paula Fay between 1972 and 1975.
His sentence hearing was told that when aged 14, Bernard called then seven-year-old Paula into the house, forced her to take off her clothes in front of some local boys and touched her inappropriately. His abuse escalated to include oral rape.
Yvonne was 13 and Bernard 15 when he started abusing her. He would wake her in the night, sexually assault her and make her watch pornography. Bernard subjected both girls to abuse in front of, and with, Richard, the court was told.
Bernard’s counsel said he grew up in a violent home, his only sexual education was from pornography, which he re-enacted, he had no previous convictions, and offered an unreserved apology to his sisters.
During his separate sentencing hearing for offences against Ms Crist, Ms Fay and Catherine Wrightstone, Richard claimed that from the age of three he was naturalised into sexually deviant behaviour by Bernard and was sexually abused by a friend of his father’s.
The family home was not a happy one. The children’s mother had a history of mental illness and their father, a self-employed businessman, was an alcoholic who was sometimes violent to their mother and the children.
The family was musical – especially the girls, who found some solace in their singing voices. “My ability to sing became my refuge, my escape, my lifeline,” Ms Fay said. “Music was something no one could take from me, and it carried me through the darkness.”
Ms Wrightstone was first to break the silence about the abuse. In 1984, aged 13 and encouraged by her best friend Michelle Gubbins, she disclosed she was being sexually abused by Richard to a specialist educator linked to her school. “Michelle said to me, if you tell a grown up, they will take care of it and it will stop.”
Her disclosure was reported to the head nun, who called in her parents to inform them.
“Nothing happened,” Ms Wrightstone said. Her parents took no action, their physical beatings of the children worsened and the sexual abuse by Richard continued.
[ Richard Brennan jailed for eight years for sexually abusing three of his sistersOpens in new window ]
Later that year, she was admitted to Dublin’s Meath Hospital with lower limb paralysis. Unable to identify the source of her condition, the hospital made a referral to St John of God’s for family therapy. Ms Wrightstone said redacted, sometimes illegible, records of those meetings included references to her father defending Richard’s actions as “just sexual curiosity”.
Her parents decided after five or six sessions not to continue with the family therapy. Ms Wrightstone had therapy for several more months but was “very guarded”.
She was not believed, and her sisters were then too frightened to disclose the abuse of them.
Back home, Ms Wrightstone said her mother was hostile when she tried to raise Richard’s abuse, telling her to “shut up” and “move on”. When aged 15 or 16, her mother’s response when told his abuse was escalating was to tell her she was “lying” and being “dramatic”.
“She said to move on and ‘get a grip’, that I would experience far worse things in life.”
In 2019, all three sisters made formal complaints to gardaí, leading to an investigation and the prosecution of both brothers, who returned from the US to Ireland for their trials.
[ Officials resist schools abuse redress schemeOpens in new window ]
Richard maintained his not guilty pleas until after his three sisters gave evidence, and two had been cross-examined in his trial last March. He ultimately pleaded guilty to counts of indecent assault and rape of Ms Fay and Ms Wrightstone.
He admitted one offence of indecent assault against Ms Crist relating to an incident when she was aged 20. Then singing professionally, she had toured in the United States and was staying in the family home while singing in Jury’s hotel as a soloist.
She woke during the night to find Richard naked in the bed on top of her and screamed at him to leave. Having initially refused, he left after she grabbed the phone, threatening to make an emergency call.
Having been ordained a Catholic priest in 1989, Richard went to Montana in the US but left the priesthood in 1992 after meeting his wife Bridget, an emergency physician. They married in 1993 and he worked in sales and later as a chaplain in the hospital where his wife worked.
Bridget Brennan, three of their adult children and two friends travelled to Ireland for the case. Ms Brennan asked the judge to receive 20 letters of support, plus testimonials from their children, on behalf of her husband, “one of the kindest, most compassionate and trustworthy people I have ever met”. She never had concerns about leaving their children with him, she said.
A theme in the sisters’ victim impact statements was their sense of strength and empowerment now their abuser had “finally been brought to justice”. They are survivors, the women stressed, and expressed deep gratitude for all who supported them, including their husbands and children.
Ms Wrightstone, a licensed psychotherapist, stressed she was not seeking “vengeance” but wanted recognition of the harm and lasting impact of the crimes on her life, “and the immense courage it took to come forward as a child, a teenager and then as an adult”.
She wanted, “most important of all”, her voice to matter “because, for too long, it did not”.
While recognising the court has limited power to address the “widespread systemic issue of sexual violence against young girls and women”, it has power “to show that the gross injustice of these types of acts will not be tolerated”, she said. “Thankfully, the Ireland of the 1980s is not the same as the Ireland of 2025.”
The damage done by childhood sexual abuse and rape is “a lifelong sentence of emotional pain, broken trust, and an ongoing struggle to reclaim safety and self-worth”.
In her statement, Ms Fay said she was a child with “no voice, no power, and no sense of worth”, whose world was “shaped by overwhelming fear”.
This justice is not just for me, but for all those who have endured such pain and fought to be heard. Today I truly am a survivor
— Paula Fay
She was 17 when she finally broke free from this “relentless” sexual abuse, having endured at least 10 years of it, beginning at just six or seven years old at the hands of Bernard and carried on through the rest of her childhood by Richard.
The “psychological torment” did not end with the abuse – it affected her mental, emotional and physical health. However, she was “immensely proud” of the woman she has become, “of her strength, resilience, and unwavering spirit”.
The sisters’ journey had been “long and arduous”. The Director of Public Prosecutions’ decision to press charges “felt like an eternity”, with legal obstacles between the women “and the chance to finally speak our truth”.
Ms Fay hoped her brother’s sentence reflected the severity of his crimes “and brings accountability long overdue”. “This justice is not just for me, but for all those who have endured such pain and fought to be heard. Today I truly am a survivor.”
In her statement via video link from the US, Ms Crist, a widowed mother of two, said she has recurring nightmares of the night Richard, aged 18, tried to sexually assault her, aged 20, as she slept. She was “terrified” of his strength and regretted not calling gardaí then “as you wouldn’t have been able to continue your sexual behaviours towards my sisters”.
He made her feel she was “a filthy piece of dirt” who “did not deserve to live”.
She had overcome anorexia that developed in her teens but developed a mental illness at the age of 28, leading to extensive treatment over years. Her serious bouts of mental illness “prove that incest lasts a lifetime”.
Music was “my saving grace” and her singing career helped take her away “from my troubled self”.
“Now I can function very well, I survived and I am a survivor,” she said. Her message was: “Never doubt and survive because you are so worth it. Life does get better.”
On Monday, Richard Brennan was jailed for a total of eight years after admitting to indecently assault of three of his sisters and raping two of them when they were minors.
