You could almost forget there was ever a time when the words “Irish swimming” didn’t evoke joy and unity and celebration, but shame and a seemingly unrelenting catalogue of horrors.
Those terrible times might even have been banished forever by the sight of Daniel Wiffen on the podium, reaching under his glasses to wipe his eyes as Amhrán na bhFiann played, or a deliriously happy Mona McSharry raising the tricolour over her head, had they not abruptly resurfaced this week in an extraordinarily cruel twist of timing.
There, on Tuesday morning’s front page of The Irish Times, was McSharry: hand over her mouth, eyes widened in disbelief at her bronze medal, the Olympic rings tattooed on her left wrist. There on Wednesday was Wiffen: rising up from the pool as the waters themselves seemed to part for him. And there, later that same day, splashed across all the homepages, was Derry O’Rourke: former swimming coach and convicted child rapist.
As though to prove the awful truth of the line from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, in which a lawyer remarks to his client that the past is not dead, it’s not even past, swimming’s darkest hour returned to cast a shadow over the bright and brilliant present, the sport’s best moments juxtaposed with its very worst.
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The O’Rourke who shuffled into court, where he was sentenced to 10 years for the rape of a girl of 14 he had coached in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was recognisable, but only just, as the man who once treated the pool as his personal fiefdom and private torture chamber.
His cruel mouth was a little slacker; the big clawing hands that meted out so much horror now gripped a cane and an old-fashioned suitcase. He gazed frankly into the photographer’s lens; this is a man with a warped messiah complex, who said at his first sentencing in 1998 that he “considered it a blessing that when I was first interviewed, my first reaction was to pray for the people I offended”.
The judge then, Judge Kieran O’Connor, told O’Rourke’s now former wife that she was “the bravest woman I have ever heard in this court” after she spoke about how her husband prayed for “the girls”. Would that still have been the case had “the girls” themselves been allowed to have their say without interruption? Judge O’Connor tried to dissuade O’Rourke’s victims from reading their statements on the grounds that they would only upset themselves. He told one woman, abused by O’Rourke from the age of 11, that he could imagine what she had been through, had “heard much worse actually”. When she said she no longer wanted to swim, he suggested she try swimming in the sea.
“I’m sorry, judge, if my distress upsets you. But I will feel better for having said it,” another told him firmly.
O’Rourke’s crimes against 11 women added up to 109 years in 1998. He was sentenced to 12, and ultimately served nine.
Though there is no remission and there are no second chances handed to victims, sometimes they make their own. This week Justine McCarthy remarked on how O’Rourke’s survivors had grown into immeasurably courageous women. They made sure he was back before the courts again in 2000, 2005 and again in 2010, when he was given a suspended sentence for rape.
You might think that in this age of zero tolerance for predatory men, there can be no more second chances for those who abuse children. Well, then, best not look too hard at the procession of athletes floating down the Seine in Paris, in particular at the Dutch volleyball team. One of its players, Steven van de Velde, was convicted of the rape of a 12-year-old British girl a decade ago.
When they first began chatting online, he was a rising volleyball star of 19 and thought she was 16. When he discovered she was only 12, he didn’t break contact. On the contrary, he was soon booking a flight. In August 2014 he took an EasyJet flight from Amsterdam to Luton where he met the child, drank Baileys with her, and raped her. Before he flew home, he told his victim to get the morning-after pill.
In what is a by-now familiar coda, she was left to deal with the fallout. The sentencing court heard that she was racked with guilt, and self-harming. He, meanwhile, was transferred to the Netherlands after 12 months and released a month later to resume his sporting career. A decade after he got on that flight to Luton, he strode out on to the volleyball court under the Eiffel Tower, a symbol of the still pervasive societal compulsion to forgive men who happen to be good with a ball, or good on the side of the swimming pool, or good in any arena at all. How must his victim feel?
How must O’Rourke’s victims feel, watching McSharry and Wiffen generate such joy and pride doing something that these women once loved? How does it feel knowing it might even, in another life, have been them?
The physical abuse carried out by men such as O’Rourke is only part of the toll they exert; infinitely more difficult to measure are all the experiences their victims are denied afterwards, all the ways in which their lives became smaller.
One line from Catherine Cleary’s report of the 1998 sentencing hearing has stayed with me because it seems, in a very direct way, to sum up the scale of incalculable loss. Her report began with the words: “The smell of chlorine gives her flashbacks...”