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‘The priest proceeded to move his hand, under the desk, down my lap, gradually but steadily’

Clerical abuse: My friend said he thought the groping at the darkened cinema was all right because a priest was doing it

I was a pupil in Crescent College, on Limerick’s O’Connell Street, a Jesuit-run day school, from about 1955 to 1966 – junior school and secondary. In my latter years there, the now notorious Fr Joseph Marmion was among the congregation and the teaching staff. In fact, I did not experience, and was not aware of, any abuse from Marmion. He was certainly something of a bully – he threw me out of the school choir in front of all the other boys when it would have been possible to do it far more tactfully – but, back then, we wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining formally about that sort of behaviour.

The school did, however, contain during those years an active abuser of whom I was well aware: Fr Oliver O’Brien. I know of three boys, myself included, whom he interfered with. There must surely have been at least one more, for reasons that will appear. In my case, he had taught me, as I recall, both in fifth and sixth year, the final years in the school. He mostly taught English. I used sometimes encounter him at a play or a concert. Here he would engage in inappropriate touching – it did not go very far because such activities at these events were hard to conceal, unlike in the cinema, which we will come to later.

On one occasion – this was early in sixth year, in autumn 1965 – while in class, he came over and sat on the desk which I shared with another pupil. It was a front desk, but there was no room for him there and it was quite uncomfortable. He proceeded to move his hand, under the desk, down my lap, gradually but steadily. As I remember, I was “saved by the bell”, since the class ended before he could go any further – though he had already gone quite far.

Soon after, he asked me to come to his room to help him shift some books about and he named a day for this activity. I turned up for the appointment. This is the most personally difficult part of the narrative. It would have been quite possible – and every instinct would have suggested – not to go and to claim I had forgotten if challenged. This, though, is to underestimate the power relations involved – the habit of obedience, the deference to authority, the general subjugation – in this scenario.

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Many targets of abuse, especially if somewhat older at the time, experience this feeling of guilty complicity, and ask themselves if they could have done more to stop it. This is part of a deadly scenario of reciprocal damage which plays such a big part in the entire complex interaction.

O’Brien’s name was never mentioned again: he was entirely erased, in a manner that would have done credit to Stalin. There was no edict: he just vanished, both as a person and a name

I met O’Brien, as I say, in the school at the appointed time. He rather testily informed me that he had lost the keys to the bookcase so the alleged moving could not go ahead. I left. I believe that if the visit to the room had gone ahead, a very serious sexual assault would have occurred.

I never saw Oliver O’Brien again after that occasion. The next day, or perhaps the day after, he was gone. Actually, the word “gone” is not quite correct. In order to be gone, you must once have been there: it was as if he never was there. As if he had never existed. A new teacher walked into the classroom and announced that he was now teaching us English. O’Brien’s name was never mentioned again: he was entirely erased, in a manner that would have done credit to Stalin. There was no edict: he just vanished, both as a person and a name.

This was in the middle of term, when removals were very rare: it did happen from one year to the next of course, but this was entirely different. In the words of the Thomas Moore song, “O Breathe Not His Name”. One can now, at least, imagine a very different response, one which might have included reaching out to find if there were other boys who had been affected by O’Brien’s activities. If the actual response can be said to amount to the fulfilment of a duty of care, I would hate to see what would not be.

Discreetly alerted

I can only assume that his activities somehow came to the notice of the authorities. He was not “shopped” by me or by the other two boys I knew who had experienced his interference. And it seems unlikely he underwent a crisis of conscience which led to him owning up. Most likely, it seems to me, the parents of some other boy – perhaps a much younger one – whom O’Brien had been abusing, discreetly alerted those in control of the school.

I discovered later – I can’t remember how or when – that he had been sent to Australia. He remained in the priesthood there until his death in 1994. I used to see his name appear among the Irish Jesuits in the Jesuit Yearbook over the years. As far as I could tell from Australian obituaries, he was not engaged in education during his time there. A memorial Mass was held for him in St Francis Xavier church on Dublin’s Gardiner Street.

His name can be found occasionally in the archives of the Limerick Leader. He was of a musical bent, and sometimes produced shows which would be mentioned by the paper. Seeing the name, I feel a bit like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, when he encounters the compromising photograph which proved an event that had never officially happened actually had occurred: so he was real – I wasn’t imagining it!

It is clear that this issue – widespread abuse by clergy – is not something evil that has visited the church from outside: it is intrinsic to it, part of its whole way of being, almost constitutive

As for the other two boys, neither was in my class, incidentally. O’Brien tended to home in on boys of a literary or creative or cultural bent. O’Brien himself genuinely had these interests and aptitudes – they were not just a means to an end, though they were that as well. Of course, singling out individuals for special attention is very much a part of the abuser’s repertoire – one feels privileged, flattered, honoured to receive all this interest.

One of these two boys had to give up an extracurricular activity he greatly valued – piano lessons – because O’Brien was involved. For both those boys, abusive activity mainly happened in the darkened cinema: in the case of one of them, O’Brien would open his trousers and grope his genitals – and with the other boy, he tried to do the same. This first said to me, when we discussed the matter much later, as men – and this is a direct quote – “I thought it was all right because a priest was doing it.” He could not have been more vulnerable, more primed for abuse.

All this was a long time ago. I’m 75 now. O’Brien is long dead, and his activities, as far as I am aware, were at the lower end of the scale – though of course it might have been different had the planned encounter in his room gone ahead. I do not have any personal need to revisit this matter in the media – I have had positive engagement with the Irish Jesuits about it in recent years and feel I have found closure. But there are aspects to it – “I thought it was all right because a priest was doing it”, the complete erasure of the perpetrator by the authorities as their response, my own passivity in turning up for the appointment – that are in some ways a microcosm of a malaise that is often much worse, and, as we now know all too well, much wider.

It is clear that this issue – widespread abuse by clergy – is not something evil that has visited the church from outside: it is intrinsic to it, part of its whole way of being, almost constitutive. Its structures were not set up with this in mind, but they might as well have been, so easily did they facilitate what inevitably happened. And only radical reform – essentially scrapping the whole set-up and starting off all over again – is ever going to bring about its eradication.

Terence Killeen is a former Irish Times journalist and Joycean scholar.

If you have been affected by the issues in this article, help is available. Contact One in Four (oneinfour.ie), Rape Crisis Helpline (1800-778888), the Samaritans (116123 or jo@samaritans.org) and HSE counselling services (1800-234112).