Schools sexual abuse inquiry: It was open season on children’s bodies. These men did what they liked

I’ve never figured out why we named our familiar paedophile after a comic caricature of a Native American. In 1971, when I entered Coláiste Caoimhín, a Christian Brothers secondary on Parnell Road in Crumlin, he was already, in our surreal nomenclature, Little Plum.
Little Plum was a racist travesty from The Beano, a half-naked “Injun” boy who said “um” instead of “the”. The Brother, who was (surely deliberately) given charge of each year’s fresh intake, and who spent most of his time in class feeling up boys and masturbating, was small and round-faced. So was the comic-book Indian. But it was a vertiginous leap from the cartoon image to the all-too-corporeal reality, from the ridiculous to the atrocious.
I suppose now the nickname was a psychological defence mechanism. How, at 13 or 14, do you absorb what you are seeing in open daylight, in a crowded room – this constant, casual violation of what are supposed to be the rules of reality? Calling the abuser Brother Plum cut what he was doing down to a negligible size, enclosed him within the frame of a Beano strip. It somehow fictionalised the experience itself, translating it from immediate witness to daft children’s story.
We were learning how to do cognitive dissonance. Irish education: the school for unseeing scandal.
When the solemn and scrupulous report of Mary O’Toole’s scoping inquiry into historic sexual abuse in religious-run schools went online, I searched for Coláiste Caoimhín and its associated primary school, Scoil Íosagáin, which I also attended. I imagine it’s what tens of thousands of Irishmen, middle aged and older, did last week. We inquired for facts that might somehow help us make sense of our own childhoods.
But for me, at least, the fragments of the past presented in the report do not clarify anything. Rather, they deepen mysteries. They make me wonder about how my own child’s mind might have worked. Did I not know what was going on? Or did I see things and forget them?
A few years ago, I wrote a book called We Don’t Know Ourselves, about Ireland in my lifetime. Brother Plum features in it. I tried to capture the way the open activities of one predatory paedophile reflected a society’s broader capacity to collude with evil by un-knowing it.
But it turns out that Plum wasn’t alone. According to the scoping report, the “total alleged abusers” in the Christian Brothers records relating to Coláiste Caoimhín was two, and to Scoil Íosagáin, it was five. The inquiry heard four specific allegations related to the secondary school and eight related to the primary school.
These figures are both greater and smaller than the reality I thought I knew. On the one hand, they mean that Plum was not an isolated pervert. All the Brothers who taught in both schools lived together in a monastery on the grounds. Depending on whether one or more of the abusers were lay teachers, there may have been up to seven child molesters there. Not necessarily all at once, but almost certainly not one at a time either.
There would thus seem to have been something much larger going on – and I did not, even as an adult, have any sense of this wider possibility. I did not know, until I read the report, that there were any abusers at work in Scoil Íosagáin, let alone that there may have been five. And I did not know that, besides Plum, there was another alleged one in Coláiste Caoimhín.
So it’s all much bigger – but also, as far as the report goes, way too small. This is not a criticism of O’Toole. She sets out, quite rightly, what she knows. But there is an obvious mismatch between the number of abusers and the numbers of survivors who have come forward with allegations. There is no way that seven predators had a total of just a dozen victims.
It was open season on children’s bodies. These men did what they liked. I can well believe that their superiors and colleagues looked on them with a certain degree of contempt, even disgust. But there’s no evidence they did anything to protect the kids entrusted to their care. They covered it up: while the names of the seven abusers at my schools were contained in the Christian Brothers’ archives, they were not in the schools’ own records. Official knowledge was carefully compartmentalised and controlled.
Taking what’s in the preliminary report, the numbers become so dizzying that I can’t take them in. If there were seven Plums at work in my schools, they surely got their hands on hundreds of boys. And the other big CBS primary school in Crumlin, Scoil Choilm, harboured a staggering 23 alleged abusers.
The reality would seem to be that, just in my own homeplace, there were 30 paedophiles with unimpeded access to schoolchildren. That means that the number of victims in just one Dublin suburb must have been in the thousands. How do you begin to comprehend this, let alone render it down into an official account?
A statutory inquiry must aim to help us as a society get our heads around all of this. But that means trying to do an impossible thing: putting a coherent shape on a collective experience that was cognitively disordered to the point of derangement.
Many of those who were experiencing abuse report entering a state of mental dislocation, forcing their minds to sunder themselves from their tormented bodies. But even those of us fortunate enough not to have been abused were also forced into distorted states of consciousness – suppressing what we were seeing, colluding with abusers by being glad they were picking on someone other than ourselves, learning early the required habits of toxic silence.
No inquiry is ever going to put back together all the shattered pieces of our picture of reality. How can it fully comprehend the shifting mentalities that facilitated what must be hundreds of thousands of crimes? An inquiry is utterly necessary – but let’s not pretend that it can be sufficient.