‘We didn’t take sexual abuse seriously as boys in Terenure College,’ John Boyne recalls

Author John Boyne is baffled at the attitudes to the sexual abuse that went on at Terenure College in Dublin when he attended there between 1983 and 1989. The College is run by the Carmelite congregation. “We didn’t take it very seriously. We were just so innocent. It still baffles me,” Mr Boyne said. “I would have been surprised the teachers didn’t know.”

In February of last year John McClean, a former teacher at Terenure College, was sentenced to eight years in prison, having pleaded guilty to abusing 23 boys in his care during his two decades at the school from the early 1970s. McClean (77) was sentenced to 11 years, with three suspended, after pleading guilty to charges of indecently assaulting 23 pupils between 1973 and 1990.

A second teacher at Terenure College was tried on abuse charges in 2004. He was acquitted on two counts of indecent assault and six counts of gross indecency by a jury following a trial in Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. The charges related to alleged incidents dating from the 1980s.

The jury could not agree in relation to six further counts of gross indecency. A second trial was to take place but did not go ahead when the complainant said he did not want it to proceed following the ordeal of the first one. The man has since emigrated

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Mr Boyne recalled how, during his years at Terenure, “there was not a boy among us who did not know what John McClean was up to. He was the subject of endless gossip, and we ruthlessly mocked any classmate who became one of his pets. We were just children, of course, and did not understand the seriousness of what was going on.”

“There was a group of adults also present in that building every day, perhaps 40 or 50 of them, who did not share our naivety. I wonder, when they search their consciences, can they so easily absolve themselves of blame?”

Mr Boyne said the word abuse was not part of the boys’ lexicon. “There were teachers who were extremely violent, terrifying, big, but that was not something we would complain about,” he said. When classmates talked about being groped etc “we used to laugh it off. We didn’t realise the damage. It was accepted as part of school life”.

There was no question of telling parents. “I did tell them about the violence but the sex was too embarrassing. We were not as sexually aware as 14- 15- 16-year-olds today.”

As he and other former Terenure pupils grew up, they had a deeper appreciation of what had gone on. “It took 10 years to realise it was not funny, especially when we saw how some boys were so deeply affected. One man who took his own life was possibly abused,” he said.

After the McClean conviction it emerged from court records that seven civil lawsuits have been filed by men abused by McClean, the majority of which listed as defendants the South Dublin fee-paying school and the Carmelite congregation which runs the school. It has been estimated that the Carmelites face settlement costs well in excess of €1 million.

John Boyne was in court the day McClean was sentenced. “He was the rugby coach. I remember hearing of `groping’. I didn’t take it seriously,” Mr Boyne said. “He was form master in my first year, when I was 12 to13. If you did something wrong you were put in the corridor. His office was nearby and you knew something was going to happen, more to do with threat and intimidation than sex. He would drop your pants and you’d be slapped. You were careful not to end up on that corridor.”

McClean was his English teacher in the years leading up to the Leaving Certificate. “He was the first person to encourage me in my writing, awarding me three gold medals for my creative abilities.”

Writing in this newspaper last year after McClean was sentenced, Mr Boyne said “sensing my growing interest in literature, he lent me a copy of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem that I have reread regularly ever since. When my debut novel was published in 2000, he was one of only two people to whom I sent a copy. Now, this fills me with shame.”

McClean “never laid a hand on me, but I did not emerge from Terenure College unscathed. I was twice a victim of serious abuse in that school, once in my early years of secondary, when I was beaten so badly by a priest that I was housebound for a week afterwards,” he said.

Later at the school he alleges that he “was molested by another teacher, a lay man, who would lean over my shoulder to examine my work, then ease his hand into my trousers, and from there into my underwear, where he would comment on whatever work was before us while casually masturbating me.” He has since made a statement to gardaí about this abuse.

“I find myself wondering whether, if the first person to touch me had not been a middle-aged man in a position of authority but a boy of my own age, would I have evolved differently, my mind less discomfited by intimacy,” he said.

Though those alleged events happened decades ago, he still thinks about them “all the time”. He had “failed in every romantic relationship I’ve ever pursued”, he said. That was “what our abusers leave us with. A history of self-loathing. A history of failed relationships. A history of loneliness.”

During the John McClean trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last year it emerged that the Carmelite Fathers knew he had been abusing children at the school since 1996. McClean admitted it in a note when then Carmelite Provincial Fr Robert Kelly had discussed “the problem” of McClean with others, the Court was told.

When investigating gardaí later put this to Fr Kelly, he told them he had “no specific memory of the admission but if it’s recorded in the notes, it’s true”. Abuse by McClean, the court heard, was also discussed in solicitors’ letters by the Carmelites. It followed a complaint from a parent about alleged abuse by McClean.

McClean was subsequently told by the Terenure College authorities in 1996 that he wasn’t returning there as a teacher or a rugby coach and was granted a career break. He went on to become Director of Rugby at UCD and lectured at the University in Sports Management. The court heard a complaint about him was subsequently made by a victim in 2016 and a file sent to the DPP who directed no prosecution.

In a statement following the sentencing of John McClean last year, Terenure College said its principal Fr Éanna Ó hÓbáin and the provincial of the Carmelite congregation in Ireland Fr Michael Troy “acknowledge the courage of the men who gave harrowing accounts to the court of the abuse they suffered”.

Both recognised “the devastating and long-lasting impact this has had on the lives of the victims and survivors and the lives of their families and friends” and they were “deeply sorry and apologise unreservedly to the former pupils who were abused as young students”.

The statement added that Terenure College and the Carmelite congregation “fully co-operate with the Garda and all relevant authorities in Child Protection matters”.