It was weighted heavily by the fact it was repeat offences/bans
Refs should not be above reproach and, given he didnât do it publicly, does seem very harsh.
The committee are still trying to figure out what Langer means
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All confused he kept referring to the ref as The Anger
Thatâs a really tough read from Franno in the Sunday Times today.
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What a dreadful post
Firstly put up the article
Secondly explain why its a tough read
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From meeting the Pope to dead in a heroin squat - via Blackrock College
Blackrock College alumnus Neil Francis shares how paedophile priests blighted his classmatesâ futures, and his regret at not knowing how to handle it back then
Neil Francis
Sunday January 08 2023, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
Angelo Andreucetti wore his Blackrock College blazer as he was given Communion by the Pope in 1979
This picture was taken on July 7, 1979, when Angelo Andreucetti, a 15-year-old classmate of mine at Blackrock College, received Communion from Pope John Paul II. When he met the pontiff, he explained the meaning of the Latin crest on his school blazer: faith and strength.
Four months later I saw Angelo at night in the school swimming pool with the notorious paedophile Father Tom OâByrne. OâByrne was wearing a womanâs swimming hat and Angelo, who could swim, had armbands on. It was 8pm and they were alone. I saw them twice more at the pool at night on their own, but as a 15-year-old didnât suspect anything untoward. Even when the two of them got changed in the office together afterwards, it didnât strike me as inappropriate.
After we left school, Angelo began a descent into hell. He became a heroin addict, faced theft charges and subsequently left for London. He died of Aids within a few years of this Vatican photo. His body lay in a drugs squat for days before it was found.
I never saw OâByrne, now dead, sexually assault Angelo Andreucetti. Yet you couldnât discount the malign influence he, or others, may have had. Given the scale of the sexual abuse, how many suicides or inexplicable early deaths can we attribute to what happened in school?
There are 90-year-old Nazis being hunted down and jailed for their crimes. There have to be consequences even for old men. Defrock and jail.
As young boys, some of us knew or suspected what was going on in Willow Park and Blackrock College. We were children in other peopleâs care, not capos or lieutenants in a mafia gang sworn to a code of secrecy, but the innocence of adolescence put a brake on our ability to articulate the conspiracy of silence around sexual abuse.
As adults, we watched in morbid fascination as accounts of abuse and depravity visited upon pupils at the hundreds of other schools on the island of Ireland run by religious orders came out in depressingly familiar fashion . . . until our turn came. Why did it take so long? That is what all the other schools must have asked as well.
In the academic year 1978-79, 52 religious and five Sisters of Charity were named on the staff register at Blackrock. An interesting omission was Father Senan Corry â sent to purgatory for his sins but taken back at a later date. Four more of those priests were engaged in this abuse scandal: Father Tom OâByrne, Father Gerard Hannon, Father Aloysius Flood and Brother Luke McCaffrey. That means that as much as 10 per cent of the community was rotten. We assume the other 90 per cent was made up of men of God engaged in the altruistic pursuit of a Christian education through a Holy Ghost programme.
Father Aloysius Flood, Father Gerard Hannon, Father Senan Corry, Father Tom OâByrne and Brother Luke McCaffery were involved in the abuse scandal
I forged a strong relationship with many of them, nearly all of whom are now dead. I am deeply conflicted here, but I recall that oft-used quote attributed to Edmund Burke: âThe only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.â We knew but could do nothing. The good guys knew too, and for a variety of reasons chose not to do something. As a matter of seriousness, it ranks just marginally behind the acts of abuse. A betrayal of trust. A duty of care forsaken. It is unforgivable. âSend the perpetrators off to another school or a parish. Send them abroad. Who would complain about abusers thousands of miles away?â
Defrockings and long prison sentences for the lifelong damage and crimes these monsters have inflicted should have been their portion in the Seventies and Eighties. Or was it just o tempora, o mores?
My grandfather, my father and his brother went to Blackrock College. I attended the school, as did my two brothers. My nephew and my three sons also went. My youngest son is currently in the fifth year. My family has lived in Blackrock for years. All of us had a really good experience at the school. We are heavily invested in the place and grateful for the education we received there. We are lucky. As a boy I needed to be challenged continuously, and I enjoyed every day I went to school there.
For some pupils, however, every day was a day of torment. In good conscience I cannot stay silent on this. In my class of 1979, 21 per cent reported on a Facebook group that they had been sexually abused while at Willow Park and Blackrock. To date, only one classmate has come forward. I am sure that anomaly will not stand for much longer.
The former pupils are a demonstrative and communicative bunch and, through dialogue, the scale and seriousness of what happened has slowly come to the fore. For me, it has taken a while to reflect and collate. To this day, the emotional states of some of the abused range from mild embarrassment to understandable rage. They have a voice and redress. This piece is for those who donât.
Angelo Andreucetti
It is an iconic photograph. The boyâs name is Angelo Andreucetti and he was a classmate of mine in Blackrock College in the late Seventies and early Eighties. The photograph was taken on July 7, 1979, and it was a privileged and momentous occasion for the boy. To meet the Pope a few months before his visit to Ireland was special. I was just one of the great unwashed who had to get a bus at 5am to the Phoenix Park â no private audience.
Because it was out of term, no one really knew that Angelo had gone to Rome or even how he had been invited. There was understandable pride in a Blackrock College boy, in a school blazer, receiving Communion from the Pope. An account of the day told of the pontiffâs question about what the words on the blazerâs crest meant: fides et robur â faith and strength.
The yearbook account, under the headline âBlackrock students meet Pope John Paul IIâ states that the Pope âput his hands on both their arms and told them he would remember them in his prayersâ. The direct line to God may not have been working that day.
Angelo was a boarder and seemed to have the run of the school, if not indeed actually running the school. He was the guy entrusted to ring the bell for classes. He ran the tuck shop. He seemed to be permanently in the Sacristy. He was an altar boy. He worked in the library and was heavily involved with computers, which back in the Seventies was avant garde. He sang at Mass and was a consistent nominee for academic excellence and religious knowledge. Angelo seemed to be a prefect, even though there was no prefectorial system in the school.
I was in a number of his classes, and we were matey without being close. When he appeared in class either early or late, some would erupt into a chorus of Angelo by Brotherhood of Man, a hit song in 1977. I never sang it.
When I travelled to the Phoenix Park in that September of 1979, I did so with my right arm in a cast. My ankle was also heavily strapped. It was the result of just one contact in an SCT rugby match as a 15-year-old. The arm break was pretty bad and would take a while to knit. Some time in November I got the cast off and started my rehab. But you canât just get the cast off and then head out into contact the next day, so I began a daily regimen of physio. I was in the weights room to build back the muscle and, because I was still not able to run, I did sessions in the pool to get a bit of cardiovascular. Study to me was superfluous.
I was given a key to the pool and, on about my third session, I went after weights at about 8pm. The lights in the pool were off, but the office lights were on and there seemed to be a key in the lock on the other side. That key fell out as I stuck my key in. I went to the office, got changed and was on the deck looking for the pool lane rope when I noticed there was someone in the pool. There was also someone walking along the side.
That someone was Angelo.
âWhat are you doing here?â he asked.
âIâm rehabbing. What are you doing here?â
âI donât think you are supposed to be here . . . now.â
I only then noticed that he was wearing arm bands, which looked ridiculous on a 15-year-old.
âCan you not swim?â I was sure he could from PE classes. I started to laugh at him. âAre you not supposed to be in study until 9pm. Whatâs with the armbands?â
Angelo turned round and walked to the end of the pool. I got the lane rope, turned on the lights and headed down to the shallow end to attach it. Halfway down I noticed that the other person in the pool was not a schoolboy. As I got closer, a man I did not recognise shouted something at me.
It was a faintly ridiculous situation because he was wearing a womanâs swimming cap with an extravagant flower on the side. It was only when he swam over and talked to me that I recognised who he was. He wasnât wearing his glasses, but his distinctive voice gave it away. It was Father Tom OâByrne, known to all as Abo.
âYou shouldnât be here now.â
âI was given a key and I have permission to be here. I am rehabbing. I was told to be out of the pool by 9.30pm.â
While Neil Francis went on to play for Ireland in the Eighties, Angelo ended up dying of Aids in a heroin squat
SPORTSFILE/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
With that I jumped in and started doing laps. The two of them left the pool. As a 15-year-old, I never suspected anything untoward. Even when the two of them got changed in the office together afterwards it didnât strike me as being inappropriate. It never occurred to me.
It took about 15 pool sessions before I was ready to get back on the pitch. I encountered the pair of them two more times, either when I was leaving or they were leaving. I never said anything to Angelo about it.
I never saw Tom OâByrne sexually assault Angelo Andreucetti. Nobody ever sees it. Angelo, I would suspect, never told anyone if he did. Since the testimony of the Ryan brothers on RTE Radio and the immediate aftermath, the modus operandi of OâByrne, a predatory paedophile, has become evident. Swimming with OâByrne alone at night. Am I adding two and two together here to get five? I donât think so.
The last time I saw Angelo was at a party on the north side of Dublin. He was a year out of school and he was out of his mind that night. There was no point in talking to him. It precipitated a quick descent into hell for the guy.
Months later news broke that Angelo was up on charges of stealing a significant amount of money from a pub in Dublin right on the Liffey. Week after week more stuff came up: drugs, more crime and allegations that were scarcely believable. Angelo left Ireland and went to London. The news trail dried up for a while. Then Angelo came out. Weeks later we heard he was a heroin addict. This simply couldnât be true. Heroin? How could an intrinsically sound and academically bright human being make such a bad decision? In the 1980s being a gay man and having a heroin habit was not a good combination.
Angelo died of Aids in a heroin squat in London in the mid-Eighties. He had lain there for days. He was destitute and friendless. His body was brought back for burial in Dublin. When I heard the news, I was numb â hard to reconcile the guy we knew at school with the end product.
Maybe something in Angeloâs DNA led him to self-destruct. However, you could not discount what sort of malign influence OâByrne or others may have had on his life. In sixth year, to me, he cut a lonely and melancholy figure. He didnât fulfil his academic potential either. What would trigger such behaviour or hasten the demise to such an extent of such a fundamentally sound person?
Every school in this country has had pupils who outwardly have had a clear vision of their potential and future course in life, only for it to spectacularly come off the rails. Whatever lights the touch paper, there is always a reason. A complicated one. What happens in their formative years, inside or outside of school hours, when they are most vulnerable? We all know dozens of them.
What we donât know in most cases is the reason why. Given the scale of the sexual abuse in our schools, how many suicides and early or inexplicable deaths can we attribute to what happened to them in school? Children who simply canât cope with the enormity of this betrayal. I think you all know at this stage what a high percentage it is. You are probably thinking of those people right now, saying: âYeah, that is what probably happened to my classmate.â
I am pretty sure what happened to the boy I knew who received Communion from the Pope and died several years later in circumstances that you would not wish on your worst enemy.
John âSmokesâ Bourke
It was a funny relationship. It is a clichĂŠ to say polar opposites, but that was how it was. John was small and chubby, looked like an accountant and smoked like a fire engine. He always wore a suit to school. Academic and bright, he was paradoxically a classic anti-establishment figure. He was the most cutting and sarcastic fella I had met at that stage, and could explain things the way they were in common English without an ounce of bullshit.
I was drawn to him because he was merciless. No pity or remorse. Always a battery of rhetorical questions, and he had the good grace to let me know that he was slagging me even when I wasnât remotely aware of it. He was a very funny guy. I think he got a kick out of hanging around with a jock. I made him laugh too.
John hated Blackrock College and everything it stood for. We often bunked off class together. Even though there was a smoking room in the school, we preferred to wander out by the back of the swimming pool. He would go missing from school for weeks at a time. Unbeknown to most of us, there had also been trouble at school, and sometimes he was not in the mood for anybody, including me. He managed to hold it together until he left.
An example of how complex he was came in March in sixth year. We beat Clongowes Wood in the senior cup final and were given the following day off. On the first day back in school, we bunked off Jack Igoeâs economics class and went out by the swimming pool.
The comedian and former Blackrock pupil Ardal OâHanlon once told a story about the time he wanted to host a talk show. He dreamt that his first guest would be Neil Armstrong, and he would have him on for an hour and never once mention the moon.
The school was agog with excitement. It was the first time we had won the cup in a long time. John knew I played in the final but never went to the match and would not under any circumstances want to talk about any event that would embellish the reputation of the school.
âDo anything at the weekend?â
âNah. You?â
âNah.â
âOh, sorry, it was my birthday on Paddyâs Day.â
âHow old?â
â17.â
âChocolate cake or sponge?â
âSponge.â
This went on for 40 minutes. Both of us unwilling to mention what happened two days previously. It was priceless.
About a month from our Leaving Cert, we were sitting down for lunch. I used to eat Johnâs lunch for him â hard to have an appetite when you are on 20 a day. One time John gave vent for about two minutes about what happened to him at Willow Park Junior School. He wasnât confiding in me, nor could it be classed as an emotional explosion.
Father Senan Corry and one other whose name I did not recognise had, like seasoned paedophiles, smelt blood in the water. Where there was a pupil with problems, there would be opportunity. John got molested and worse for the best part of three years. He then abruptly stopped talking and looked at me. No tears, no emotion. To my regret, I handled this admission badly and he stormed off. By the end of the week, we were back bunking and nothing was ever said about what had happened.
We both did Latin and economics, which are at the end of the Leaving Cert exam cycle. He was elated to be leaving. He was not going to celebrate, so we shook hands and walked out the gate together.
In Neil Francisâs class of 1979, 21 per cent reported on a Facebook group that they had been sexually abused while at Willow Park and Blackrock
BRYAN MEADE FOR THE TIMES
In January 1990, I played in a Test match against England in Twickenham. I decided to stay a few days in London and headed to lunch in Chelsea. About half a mile from the Stamford Bridge end is a junction on the Kingâs Road with pedestrian lights. As I was waiting for the lights to change, I noticed this guy looking at me. Punk was dead by the time the Eighties hit, so to see one in 1990 was, even on the Kingâs Road, a relative rarity. He had a foot-long lemon-and-lime mohawk, metal in his ears, brows and nose, a black leather jacket with chains, red tartan trousers and the obligatory Doc Martens.
The lights took a while to change and, while they did, I looked again at the punk in the doorway. He was now looking at me, smoking a cigarette. That pained agonising drag was unmistakable. He was only six or seven metres away, and my line of vision was clear: it was John Bourke. There were cars driving through and it was noisy. I lip-synced to him: âSmokes?â He nodded. I went to go to the other set of pedestrian lights to walk over to him but as I did he made a hand gesture that very definitively said: âKeep going â I really donât want to have to explain myself to you.â It was a gesture motioning me to go on about my business. It was done with such conviction that I did not even argue.
Halfway through lunch, I excused myself and ran up to the junction where there was a quorum of about half a dozen punks. I asked them if they knew John Bourke. They all looked blankly at me. What was I thinking? When you escape you can be anyone you want to be. John wasnât John any more.
John Bourke died in March 2022. Months after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he sent an email to Mediahuis to inquire whether the Neil Francis who used to write about rugby for them was the same Neil Francis who had gone to school in Blackrock. I mailed him several times but got no reply.
John ended up living out his final few years in a hostel in Waterford. A gay man, he drifted around London and America for years, eking out an existence writing about music and promotions. A boy of infinite talent and ability who really only had one parachute, and that was to get away from the place that destroyed him. The minute details of his life are too depressing to recount here. However, when the week of reckoning came and he knew the game was up, he did not want to die in hospital. He had no choice.
Corry, his torturer and abuser, died at the ripe old age of 83, in the confines of a well-appointed private nursing home, without a semblance of contrition or guilt for his many crimes, and he lies in relative splendour in the Spiritan plot in Shanganagh cemetery.
If there is a Hell . . .
In his comprehensive apology to all students who were abused at Spiritan schools, Father Martin Kelly, the provincial of the Spiritan congregation, made a salient point when he said: âI want to go further: any notion that those who suffered were âweakâ in some way and share some element of blame for whatever happened to them is completely and utterly wrong.â
He is right. Itâs a false assumption that the paedophiles picked on weaker kids. The better-looking you were as a kid, the more attractive you became to your abuser. You didnât get immunity because you played team sports in school.
The truth is that just as many strong-willed kids with a penchant for avoiding trouble were pestered and molested. In the space of a 40-minute maths lesson, Corry could fondle every single boy in a class of 30.
There are no guarantees in life. You need luck along the way, and if that luck just means staying out of harmâs way at school, sometimes that is all the leg-up you need. There is a familiar theme here with these abused boys. You could see the spark drain out of them. It was perceptible and obvious, and yet we all missed the signs.
In his brave but troubling account in The Irish Times of the trauma he suffered in the school, Chris Doris told a tale. Chris was a serious talent on the rugby and soccer fields. He was a captain of cup teams and a boy who was able to look after himself . . . and yet.
No one was safe.
In conclusion, two things come to mind that need to be dealt with.
Over the decades there have been a number of suicides and inexplicable deaths that happened in the school, and a few shortly after leaving. Many families would be understandably reluctant to delve into these painful episodes again, but I wonder if you could attribute a good portion of them to the abuse meted out by the animals who caused so much damage.
What I do find unsettling is some of the verdicts handed down by the highest courts in the land.
Some crimes should never be statute barred â 90-year-old Nazis are still being hunted down and jailed. How was Tom OâByrne able to walk free? Quite how somebody like George Gibney, the swimming coach, is not serving a 40-year prison sentence is disturbing. Quite how Brendan Smyth got away with what he did before he was eventually jailed and died was precisely what it was: a national scandal.
In this case there have to be consequences even for old men. In every religious order. Defrock and jail.
I am bereft.
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Good article. Sickening shit
Odd he sent his kids to that school though
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Swimming is the common denominator.
Thereâs a hell of a lot of anger amongst past pupils about it. A lot did not know tbf and would reevaluate now.
21% is some number to have been abused.
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Isnât the sexual abuse victims group called 1 in 4 ?
One in four of what ?
Summary:
27 % of all Irish children, one in four, have experienced sexual abuse before the age of 17.
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Jaysus.
Thatâs a scandalously outrageous situation.
Very good article. Unusual heâd go into such detail on yer man Angelo though I wonder what his family think. At least bourke admitted it happened to him so heâs not speculating
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https://twitter.com/JurassicArse/status/1614551269120647168?t=jYOO5ExA7Rf_pxss1ah9NA&s=19
Hereâs what the poor manâs family think. This is cuntish behaviour from Francis.
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How much of the article was actually correct?
Itâs incredible the way the rugby set protect Francis
That is incredible. Absolutely unforgivable. Imagine reading that about a family member if it was actually bollox?
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Flipping hell. What a cunt.
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