Former pupils to meet senator about alleged abuse
According to Senator Mark Daly, he will meet with a number of past pupils who are alleging abuse at Coláiste an Chroí Naofa.
Some of the group have not yet made complaints to the order or to gardaí.
The organisers hope to have legal representatives present at the meeting so the group can examine the best way to process civil and criminal complaints.
Mr Daly said: “We will also be asking the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church [NBSCCC] to begin their planned audit of the religious orders with the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, as there are so many questions around how they handled complaints around Fr Donncha Mac Cárthaigh.
“We do not have any faith in the Sacred Heart Missionaries’ internal investigation as you can’t have an order investigating themselves in a matter like this.”
The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart’s incoming Provincial Superior, Fr Joseph McGee, will visit Coláiste an Chroí Naofa in Carraig na bhFear in September to begin a process where he “will personally contact and interview past and present members of staff and past pupils”.
Seven abuse complaints were made by six men and one woman against former principal Fr Mac Cárthaigh, who was a Cork GAA county selector and trainer between 1986 and 2008. In the late 1980s, he stepped aside as principal “under a cloud”, and became a career guidance counsellor at the school. In 1996, he was put on restricted ministry.
Several emails have been sent by the Irish Examiner to the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart seeking interviews with the order, but no response has been received.
Meanwhile, a solicitor for Fr Mac Cárthaigh has said his client is innocent and that Mr Daly has “seriously damaged his reputation”.
“Parliamentary privilege is a legal privilege and should not have been used by Senator Daly to name Fr Mac Cárthaigh, an individual who has never been convicted of an offence under the laws of this country. Fr Mac Cárthaigh agrees with the remarks of the Minister for Justice Alan Shatter who described Senator Daly’s naming of him as completely inappropriate,” he said.
- Senator Mark Daly can be contacted at Mark.Daly@Oireachtas.ie
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The beatings in Carraig were horrendous. Sometimes they were closed-fist. I was lucky in this regard myself but there was always a constant fear.
Fr Daly [Ó Dálaigh] was, in my opinion, vicious and out of control with the beatings. I saw him beat children for sitting on their beds (this was prohibited and there was a fine for it) or for not cleaning their cubicle if they were second or third years. I still remember the screams as one child was banged against the walls of the cubicle.
If he heard somebody talking in the dormitory and nobody owned up to it, Daly often brought the entire dormitory (60-70 pupils) downstairs to the study area in the middle of the night for an hour or two. During this nighttime study, some very severe beatings were given if children were caught talking or messing.
I can confirm the underarm pinches, clatters across the face and slaps with a stick. Dinny [Mac Cárthaigh] went from locker to locker every Thursday night, like other people have said. Most Thursday nights, he lowered his hand on me and I placed mine on his and I believe I stopped him going further.
Study time in Carraig was 5.30pm-7pm, then 8pm-9.45pm. First years sometimes got excused from the second session to go swimming. After a while, if first years wanted to go swimming, they had to swim in the nude, otherwise they had to study. I swam in the nude myself. It was another priest, not Ó Dálaigh or Mac Cárthaigh, who oversaw the swimming sessions.
Mac Cárthaigh never interfered with the day boys or Cork city boarders. He and Daly were too clever for that. Instead it was the young boarders who didn’t see their parents for months at a time. Those priests were meant to look after us instead of parents.
Instead, we were subjected to some of the most violent men that I have ever seen in my life. We’ve waited for years for this to come out and thank God, it now has. I’ve not doubt there were hundreds abused by Donncha Mac Cárthaigh and Tadhg Daly at that school.
I can still picture boys being beaten and abused. Then there were all the boys that upped and left in the middle of the night. If Fr Donncha was on dormitory supervision, the boys would lie there in the dark, petrified that the sound of footsteps would stop near them, as he’d sit down beside you and start whispering.
I will never the forget the infirmary for the junior school, the sick bay. It was at the end of a 150-yard corridor from the school.
Genuinely very sick boys would be sent there, and very often there’d just be one boy in a room with six beds. Dinny Mac Cárthaigh was always down there and the way he’d operate, he’d check your forehead, your chest and then somehow end up at your testicles.
Sometimes those boys didn’t see a doctor for days. Remember, these were very sick children all alone in an isolated room.
There’s one former teacher that I’d love to contact and that’s Pat McGrath. We used to call him Quick Draw McGrath. As far as I know, when he was still teaching there, he tried to defend one of the boys who had decided to lodge a complaint to the order against Mac Cárthaigh. He’s since left the priesthood, I believe.
These stories have caused such sadness for my family, as we have always felt that something serious had happened to Philip during his time at the school. He was a normal boy when he went in there — was into hurling, football and soccer.
But, he got into a lot of trouble there and Mac Cárthaigh and Ó Dálaigh were regularly on to my mother, complaining about him.
My mother eventually removed him from the school as there were such problems and sent him to a nearby day school. However, by the time he started working, he started to have nervous breakdown after nervous breakdown. For the past 30 years now, he has refused to speak at all. He just won’t communicate. The very most you’d get out of him is “I’m trying my best” when you ask him how is. He’s in long-term psychiatric care.
He was a perfect young fella and I remember my mother when she was alive repeatedly saying that she regretting ever letting him in the door of the school.
I met Mac Cárthaigh years later through football and the man couldn’t look at me and did everything to avoid me.
It’s 40 years later and I have not got over what I suffered there at the brutal hands of Daly and Mac Cárthaigh.
My father died when I was young and I count every day of his passing with regret as he would not have allowed what happened to me to occur. I can not believe that the lid has finally been blown off the horrors of that educational gulag.
An example of the physical abuse? I was playing football for the U14 school team and I scored three goals one day. There was huge excitement and I became “McCarthy’s pet”. A few weeks later we were playing in Castlemartyr and I missed a goal.
He ran onto the pitch in a rage, hit me on the head from behind, turned me upside down and struck me on the ground so badly that the trainer of the Castlemartyr team had to restrain him and pull him off me. I was 13.
Another time I was singing in the school choir in the Feis Matthew Hall in Cork. We won the competition that night, bringing huge honour and prestige to the school. I could not do my Latin homework that night and the next morning, Mac Cárthaigh began to ask me about Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I could not answer even though my life depended on it. He began to hit me, slowly at first with his index finger protruding from his fist — this was his forte — then he began to slap me across the face and then beat me around the class until he was exhausted, with his spittle flying all over the place. He was in a lunatic rage.
All the other students could say was: “Thank God he didn’t ask me.”
Another form of abuse by Daly was to line up some of the junior boys in the shower and have the third year students line up with wet towels waiting for you to run the gauntlet. Then you would get the crack of the wet towel along your legs or back or stomach. If you ever got that crack from a wet towel you will never forget it, not to mind three or four cracks of it. This was allowed to go on by Daly.
Things happened in the showers that I have blanked out. I remember Daly coming in to us but I can’t remember what happened there. I am not comfortable with those memories.
As for the sexual abuse, I was abused by a group of four students and one individual student in the linen room between the showers and the sick bay. They were Daly’s pet boys. They preyed on me and other vulnerable lads and I was abused daily or weekly for two years in the linen room where the football jerseys were stored.
I had things done to me there that I cannot even think about. I was a vulnerable child living in fear of the two monsters and their pet boys. I remember McCarthy did the “old hand check” to me in the sick bay. In some way, this was better than a beating from him. At least the fondling was over in seconds, the beating went on for minutes.
We used to swim in the pool that was in the glen, as they used divert the river into the pool for the month of May. The water was freezing but we had to swim in it. One day word went around that a senior student from Donegal (a decent guy who used talk to me and, as you can imagine, that compassion was as precious as a mother’s smile in that horror show of abuse and deprivation) was going to drown Daly in the pool. We agreed to give him money towards the bet.
Rumour had it he had collected £150, a king’s ransom in those days. Anyway, Daly was standing beside the pool wearing wellingtons, his shirt open and his sleeves rolled up. He was reaching into the pool, pushing guys heads under the water, laughing. Then the student grabbed him around the neck and jumped in. He took him under the water three times. He was drowning him. Then Mac Cárthaigh came running, and another priest, and pulled him out and revived him. The pupil was expelled just before his Leaving Cert.
I must say this: there were true gentlemen there. Fr Clerkin, Fr Clarkson, Fr Dwyer, Fr Gleeson, the lay teachers who were also kind and normal: Mr Murphy, the maths teacher, Mrs Sheehan, the elocution teacher and our art and music teachers.
I never thought Fr Mac Cárthaigh was as bad as Fr Ó Dálaigh. He gave a lot of fellas a real trouncing all right but not as much as I’d have thought Ó Dálaigh gave. A lot of the priests were brutal, really brutal. I remember being paralysed with fear lying in bed at night in case I didn’t know my Latin for Ó Dálaigh.
He would punch every guy in the arm so brutally if you didn’t know the answer. I was so small that I used to fall down with the punch. Children weren’t respected then. The lay teachers were never in their league but I think a lot of the physical abuse from priests was generally accepted by parents. I remember my mother saying: “You will thank those priests for those beatings in years to come.” The people who were good at hurling and football had an easier ride. The smart and the small were in for it. I would be concerned about any investigation into abuse there though, as I know when people were trying to organise a reunion recently, a lot of the records of pupils had been destroyed.
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IT IS with a great sense of sadness that I have read recent reports concerning Sacred Heart College Carrignavar and in particular its former headmaster, Fr Donncha Mac Cárthaigh. I was prompted to write this article following the headline in the Irish Examiner on August 3, “Carrignavar school ‘a concentration camp’, say ex pupils”.
First of all, let me state that I have been a member of the board of management of the school for the last nine years. However, I had no contact with other board members or members of the Sacred Heart Congregation prior to writing this. I hope I can give an honest and fair account.
I attended Carrignavar as a boarder from 1968 to 1973, a period when there were just 120 pupils in the school. All of them were boarders. I got to know Fr Mac Cárthaigh from the very first day, when he addressed me in Irish. I had very little Irish at that stage but by the time I left I was a fluent speaker. He was an outstanding teacher of Latin and Irish, even if his teaching methods were severe. This was at a time when corporal punishment was still used on a regular basis in the classroom.
Fr Mac Cárthaigh was no exception and, yes, it is true that he did extend this to the dormitory when correcting copies while students were reading at night before lights out. This was wrong, of course, the same way as it was wrong for national school teachers to exert physical punishment on small boys in days gone by.
However, during my time at the school, it was not uncommon for all of the students to get honours in the classes that he taught. He had a great ability to zone in on important points before exams. He brought the same sense of focus and commitment to the training of football teams, or indeed to any other project that he took on.
In one of the articles during the past week reference is made to the lake as one of the attractive features of the school. It was Fr Mac Cárthaigh, with the help of some students, who built a dam during my time in the school and cleared scrubland to create that lake. It won a national environment award. It was Fr Mac Cárthaigh who first alerted the Kerry minor football selectors to the emerging skill of a great Kerry player, and who trained the college to win the All-Ireland B football colleges competition. He was instrumental in the school winning awards in cultural competitions.
The saddest part of recent events has been the allegations of sexual abuse made by Senator Mark Daly under privilege in the Seanad. Schools should be a place where children feel safe to grow and achieve their full potential. Nobody has a right to rob them of their childhood.
I read Henry McCullagh’s story in last Saturday’s Examiner and am deeply saddened by its contents. It is clear from recent newspaper articles that other past pupils have expressed similar sentiments. There is reference made to the sick bay where young boys were sent when sick and about Fr Mac Cárthaigh’s visits to them.
The fall from grace of one of my great role models is hard to take. My immediate reaction has been to wonder how could somebody with such ability do such bad things, although it must be stated that Fr Mac Cárthaigh, through his solicitor, has stated his innocence. My great love for football and for writing poetry was nurtured in Carrignavar, as was my great love of nature and all things Irish. Fr Mac Cárthaigh was central to all of those.
During my time at the school, it was all too evident to me that boarding school life could be tough on even the toughest. The shy lad who found it hard to make friends was particularly vulnerable.
During my time there was a great sense of kindness and care from many of the priests and the two lay teachers.
To state that the school should be compared to a concentration camp is extreme. It wasn’t perfect but neither were the times we lived in.
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