They called him God. That tells a story in itself about the coach who devastated their childhoods. For Derry O’Rourke, in their young eyes wide with ambition, had the power of the Almighty. He could make them stars.
The room where the club’s flotation aids were stored and where he molested and hypnotised them while ostensibly measuring their sprouting breasts was known as the “chamber of horrors”. That was what the young swimmers commonly called it long before any of them began revealing its monstrous secrets.
It is more than 26 years since the former national and Olympics coach – who was sentenced on Thursday to ten years for the rape of a teenager he coached in the late 1980s and early 1990s – was jailed for the first time.
That day, January 30th, 1998, his individual sentences – which ran concurrently – amounted to 109 years for raping and sexually and indecently assaulting 11 children in King’s Hospital swimming club. Tough luck for him – they grew into extraordinarily courageous women.
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Though he would serve just nine of those years, that was only the start of the unmasking of Ireland’s most convicted child sex abuser. Two years later, the father of six got a further four years for crimes against six more girls – the youngest aged just 10. Five years after that he got another 10 years for raping and assaulting another child. On July 18th, he was convicted yet again for the rape and sexual assault of a girl when she was 13 and 14.
This time, he pleaded not guilty to one count of rape and 15 counts of indecent assault, necessitating a gruelling trial.
Though court rules prevented his identification in news reports during the trial, it was obvious who he was to anyone familiar with O’Rourke’s modus operandi. His habitual wont was to pick out a child, take her to his chamber of horrors, make her raise her arms and start assaulting her. So invincible did he feel, he mauled and raped the children while their parents waited in their cars outside for predawn training sessions to end.
When some of the women in the first prosecution realised O’Rourke was on trial yet again this month, their concern was for the complainant; their conversations replete with admiration for her bravery in continuing the pursuit of justice.
Significantly, this latest conviction is for rape and indecent assaults he committed between October 1989 and June 1990 because, at the sentencing hearing for his first imprisonment 26 years ago, his senior counsel, Patrick Gageby, had pleaded for leniency on the grounds that there had been no “sexual intercourse offending”, as he called it, after 1983.
The first Garda investigation into O’Rourke began in January 1993. For nearly three years, the former clerk in Donnelly’s Coal Yard on Dublin’s Sir John Rogerson’s Quay insisted he was innocent. He exploited every legal loophole available to try to elude justice. In the end, he pleaded guilty.
Now aged 78, he looks more shrunken than he did then, when he arrived in the courthouse to learn his fate 26 years ago. As if advertising that he was not, actually, God, he wore a heavy coat with a holy pin in the collar and was accompanied by a priest with an anti-abortion petition, which he asked survivors’ families to sign. Word quickly spread that the coach had found God.
It was a sort of divine intervention that first brought O’Rourke to Garda attention. One of his former proteges was, by then, living abroad. On reading that a sports coach was being investigated in Ireland for sexually abusing children, she presumed it referred to O’Rourke. She contacted gardaí and arranged to give a statement.
In fact, the report had been referring to George Gibney, his successor as national and Olympics coach, who fled Ireland after his prosecution on charges of sexually assaulting and raping 27 young swimmers had collapsed in 1993.
O’Rourke and Gibney were part of a contemporary quartet of Ireland’s most powerful figures in swimming who all ended up behind bars for their crimes against children in their care. The other two were Fr Ronald Bennett, a former spiritual director and sports master at Gormanston College who ran the Irish branch of the world Catholic student games, and Frank McCann, who murdered his wife Esther and her 18-month-old daughter Jessica by arson to cover up his sexual abuse of a vulnerable young swimmer that resulted in her pregnancy.
The former swimmer who had made the erroneous assumption returned to Ireland to see O’Rourke jailed for the first time. She told the judge how her old coach’s shadow pursued her throughout her life. She had never told her parents what he did to her, she said, and now her mother was dead.
In 1980, O’Rourke had been Ireland’s coach for the Moscow Olympic Games when this young swimmer was on the national team. At some stage, the girl got lost in the Olympic Village. After the Games, O’Rourke was briefly suspended by the Irish Amateur Swimming Association (IASA). “I believe it was because somebody saw him leaving my bedroom,” she said years later. “That was the last time he raped me.”
O’Rourke has wreaked immeasurable damage. Some survivors of his abuse have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, some have been hospitalised. There have been suicide attempts and estrangements and addictions. Karen Leach, who once had a glittering future in the pool, has attributed her mother’s suicide to her anguish on learning what the coach had done to her only daughter. “He killed her,” Leach has said. “He might as well have stood behind her and pushed her into the canal.”
There are regrets, still. One is that individuals in position to intervene failed to act, possibly rescuing some children from O’Rourke’s clutches. Bart Nolan, a swimmer’s father who protested with placards outside meetings of the IASA – rebranded as Swim Ireland – was derided as a crank. On one occasion, gardaí were called to remove Nolan from picketing the association’s annual general meeting.
O’Rourke’s most famous swimming charge was Michelle Smith, who won three gold medals at the Atlanta Olympics but was later suspended for four years for tampering with a urine test. While O’Rourke never attempted to abuse her, in January 1998, she called for a State inquiry into the failure by the IASA and King’s Hospital club committee to stop his crime spree. Five months later, a report by Roderick Murphy, then a senior counsel and former chairman of Glenalbyn swimming club, dealt with both Gibney and O’Rourke but mentioned no names – not even of the two convicted criminals.
If O’Rourke’s punishment has been going on a long time, it is still shorter than the protracted injuries he inflicted on the children he assaulted and raped. Any doubt about that can be dispelled by the emergence of a new complainant more than a quarter of a century after his name dominated the news.
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