’I go through the pain every day but I don’t care anymore. I am not afraid of him’
HOME wasn’t a good place for Aoife (not her real name). She knew she had to escape for her own sake and back in those days, there were only two ways out.
“I could get pregnant at 17 and escape into a bad marriage or I could escape into the convent. I was religious so I chose the nuns. To be fair, I liked it there and the nuns were good to me. You know, if it wasn’t for what happened with the adoption, I’d probably still be there,” she muses.
Aoife’s life and Aoife as a person changed irrevocably when she found out she was adopted at the age of 20. Suddenly, her life had been shown up as a lie. She didn’t know who she was or what she was at. She couldn’t function or cope with convent life. The only solution seemed to be to leave: “I was very upset at that time, very vulnerable. He said that he’d talk to me about it and someone said ‘he’d be good at that’... I was all over the place. I was so hurt. So I went to his house and he plied me with drink and then... then he anally raped me.”
“He” is a priest who was loved by his parishioners. One and all described him as a “great man”, a fantastic asset to the community, a parish stalwart. “He” is a priest from the Diocese of Cloyne. “You know, he was delighted with himself when he did that to me. He wanted power over me and he knew for a long time that I had absolutely no time for him.
“He was always in the convent and the nuns loved him, thought he was just fantastic. He was in and out all the time, over having his three meals, in with the nuns chatting to them all. I couldn’t stand him with all his little sexual innuendos.
“I remember him roaring laughing telling the nuns about the time that he was talking to fifth-year pupils about condoms and how he’d told them that ‘sex with a condom was like sucking a sweet with the paper on’. I remember I just said what about AIDS and all the people dying of AIDS. He didn’t like that one bit.”
Aoife couldn’t go to the toilet properly for up to three weeks after she was raped. Her body went into physical shutdown. A year later she tried to kill herself and it was then a close friend, a nun, tried to reach out to her that she disclosed her secret. “She did the most wonderful thing for me. She said to me immediately after ‘I believe you’. That was the biggest thing. I was nobody. I was an orphan. I had left the Church and yet, she believed me. It was amazing.”
For years after the abuse, she watched his movements. “Every year I’d buy the diocesan directory to see where the fucker was. I kept watching to see if anything was coming out about him. I knew he’d been put on restricted ministry,” she said.
Years later, she found out he had abused a young girl that she had befriended when she was still a novice nun.
“She was a beautiful, beautiful girl. She was beautiful but she was also intelligent. She had everything. She had a wonderful mother and father and a wonderful life ahead of her. I had nothing. My biggest regret is that I never got to hold her hand, to reach out to her. I could have held her hand and walked up and down the town with her if she was in pain.
“I go through the pain every day but I don’t care anymore. I am not afraid of him anymore which is something incredible. I think he knows that too. I speak out more than most about what has happened. I’ve told people. I’ve told people in the pub.
“People are always surprised when you tell them as they think you are so normal. But no one knows what we go through every day of our lives. But you have to try to survive by remembering the fact that you are better than them.”
Aoife has spent many years in counselling. She was rarely out of tracksuits, avoided discos like the plague always disgusted by her sexuality. She had relationships but her ability to trust anyone was robbed by that one time visit to that house — a house where a bewildered young girl had been promised a kind ear.
At the Listowel Races years later, she was in the bar when she looked up and saw him. He was looking down at her from behind the glass enclosure. “My God. You’ve turned into a beautiful woman,” he smiled.
Nineteen years later in 2009, overcome by the media coverage of the abuse cover-up in the diocese, she met a friend in a Cork city hotel to ask her advise about going to the gardaí. Leaving after that chat, she saw him again, standing behind glass sheeting, this time passing by the hotel’s exterior facade.
“I knew then it was a sign from that girl, a sign that I had to come forward and make an official complaint,” she said. Aoife has since received an apology from the diocese.
