Priest from Dublin denies assault charges

A priest working as a music teacher in a Munster secondary school has gone on trial on eight counts of alleged indecent assault against a student over 30 years ago.

Henry Moloney, aged 77, with an address at Kimmage Manor in Dublin, denies the eight charges which relate to allegations of indecent assault between September 1981 and March 1982.

The alleged victim told Clonmel Circuit Court yesterday that the abuse started within a week or two of the beginning of the school year in 1981, after the accused asked him to join the choir.

Fr Moloney was the choirmaster and played the organ in the school’s chapel and the first incident was in the organ gallery, the complainant told the court.

“I remember him pulling me in close to him the first time,” said the alleged victim. “He would start touching off me. I suppose I knew it was wrong but it was hard to back away, the position I was in.”

Fr Moloney put his hand under his shirt and down his trousers, to the complainant’s buttocks, he said.

Asked by David Humphreys BL, for the State, how he felt about this, he said: “Confused. I knew it was wrong. I was upset. It was indecent. I thought: ‘I can’t tell anyone because no one will believe me over a priest.’ “

Eventually, the priest asked him to go to his room in the college and abused him there. After some time, “it got worse” in Fr Moloney’s room, “to the point where you would call it rape, buggery, I don’t know”.

The accused told him not to tell any of the other priests or teachers in the school.

Before Christmas 1981, there were about 20 incidents in the room, “maybe four or time times when I was raped”, and after Christmas there were another “30 or 40 times when I would be summoned to his room, somewhere between 10 and 15 times when I was raped”, the complainant told the court.

The trial continues.