The kindly parish priest had taken the young man under his wing, offering him friendship, counselling and a settled home. After first inviting him to stay for weekends away from the probation hostel and then moving him permanently into a spare room at the presbytery, the priest eventually moved Peter O Connell into a mobile home at the end of a farmer s garden in Co. Kilkenny.
When the priest moved to another parish in the same county some years later, his young friend accompanied him. Again, he lived in a caravan at the rear of the priest s house, and gradually paid back the #2,500 which it cost.
To outsiders it must have seemed as if the wayward young man with the mental age of a 12-year-old had found his good Samaritan. But instead of finding sanctuary from a wretched life of sexual abuse, homelessness, crime and subsequent psychological problems, the young man suffered a remorseless onslaught of sexual molestation and rape.
His routine of degradation, during which he too abused other men, remained a dirty secret for 12 years.
Daylight was finally cast upon the sordid occurences at the priest s house in rural Kilkenny when Peter was arrested for molesting two young boys in the town. When the Gardai interviewed him about the incidents, he told them in graphic detail the litany of abuse he had suffered, frequently at the hands of State and religious institutions from which he had sought help.
Despite desperate pleas from the priest to Peter to keep quiet about the cleric s sexual activities with Peter and the string of young men who had slept over in his house, Gardai were treated to a heartbreaking confessional. The priest, in his early 40s, was subsequently convicted and jailed for eight years for a series of sexual offences, including the buggery of an altar boy. An inquiry set up by the Minister for Justice, Nora Owen, is investigating allegations that a number of vulnerable youths were passed from State-run institutions in Waterford and Kilkenny into the priest s supervision from the early 1980s at the latest.
Peter, now aged 33, received his punishment some weeks ago for his molestation of two young boys in daylight during 1994. He was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, but he remains in a psychiatric hospital pending a High Court hearing into his future accommodation by the South Eastern Health Board.
Sentencing him at the end of his trial, held in-camera at Kilkenny Circuit Court, Judge Michael O Leary said prison was not suitable for him. The defendant was, he said, more sinned against than sinning .
This is his harrowing story.
Peter was the fourth eldest of six children. His father was a chronic alcoholic who was physically violent towards his family, and who sexually abused Peter from a young age and right through his adolescence. His three sisters had to be taken into care by the State, because of incest, for which his father was charged. Peter was moved constantly during his early childhood, living in Waterford, Dublin and England and also spent a great deal of time in hospitals and institutions.
A psychiatric report carried out on Peter, based on notes on Out-Patient attendance and psychiatric admissions since 1987, reveals how he was institutionalised from the moment he was born. At just six months he was hospitalised because he was lacking in proper nutrition. When he was three years old he was put into care at a convent in England, and by the time he was four and a half he was being looked after at a similar institution in Co. Waterford.
After the family moved to Dublin, when he was aged five, he was sent to a centre for slow learners run by a religious order. In one of his six statements to Gardai, which have been seen by Hot Press, he recalled: Br. XXX used to take off my pants and slap me until I cried. Br. XXX used to put his hand between my legs and feel me.
Peter also described how a lay teacher at the school took a group of four boys to his home for tea and biscuits after a swimming trip. After sending the other boys home, he brought Peter to an upstairs bedroom and ordered him to get undressed and get into bed. The man then climbed in beside him and sexually abused him.
In a typical example of the innocence in which his statements are frequently couched, Peter said: I know it was his house because he had the key for it. He was 32 at the time of this interview.
It was during this time that his father s incest with his daughters came to light and they were taken into care. But Peter was persistently taken home from various institutions by his father. After leaving the centre for slow learners at the age of 12, he lived with his father until he was 17.
His father had taught him to steal and Peter began to lead a life of petty crime. For a time he slept rough in the Kilbarrack area of Dublin and was regularly caught for robbing handbags, stealing cars and shoplifting. His became a tragically familiar face at the Children s Court in Dublin Castle.
Peter did reach out for help on a number of occasions, as he would do repeatedly later in his life. Tragically, however, those from whom he sought help also abused him sexually.
In 1982, he walked into a social welfare office in Dublin looking for money. At the time, Peter was sleeping at a hostel. He filled in some forms and was told to return some days later. On his next visit he met the teacher who had abused him at his house following the swimming trip and he was taken into an office, surrounded with glass windows, where he was molested. Peter recalled: I pulled up my underpants and trousers. He said he would give me some money. He gave me some money in a cheque, I think it was between #30 and #40. I left the office then. XXX said: If you are ever stuck for money or anything, call back .
In a desperate and confused state, Peter began calling for food and money to a religious house in Dublin, where he got a job cleaning windows for three days. But the cycle of degradation in which he was caught up followed him from one religious institution to another.
Here he was forced to have sex with the priest in his bedroom, and on other occasions in the shower. He would wash me, then he would have sex with me. He added: I stayed in his bedroom with him one night when I had nowhere to go. I left early in the morning again. The reason I used to go there was for food and money and the reason I left (sic) this man do this to me was because I was confused.
It was three weeks after his arrival at a probation hostel in Kilkenny that Peter met the Co. Kilkenny priest with whom he would live. The cleric used to call to see people there and he immediately suggested to one of the staff that Peter visit him for weekends.
Peter was taken with another young man in a mini-bus to the priest s house and during their stay Peter recalls that the other young man slept in the priest s room. A few days later, the other young man told Peter that the cleric was bent and they brought it to the attention of the probation worker. He didn t believe them and the following weekend Peter returned to the priest alone.
On this particular visit, he confided in the priest about his traumatic life, before taking himself off to the pub where he consumed several pints of Guinness. When he arrived back, the priest asked whether he had been drinking, and then showed him up to his bedroom, warning him not to make any noise. The priest came back some minutes later and sexually assaulted him. Peter s brief attempt to alert someone in authority to the priest s activities had fallen on deaf ears. The moment had passed and the consequences would be terrible.
His statement reveals: I went back to Fr XXX s other weekends after this. I slept in his bed these times, and then, after a while, I began to stay in the spare room. Every night I slept in Fr XXX s bed we had sexual activity, including he (sic) having full sexual intercourse with me. I allowed this to happen because I was damaged at the time, because I had been abused myself.
The priest who also had a chronic drink problem was moved to another parish in 1991 and Peter went with him, selling the mobile home he had lived in and having another bought for him by the priest. He paid him back over the next three years.
According to Peter s deeply disturbing statements, the priest lured a whole string of young men to his home, sleeping with them in his double bed while Peter was in the caravan at the end of the garden. Such visitors included the priest s 13-year-old nephew and a French or German hitch-hiker in his 20s who stayed the night with the priest before being driven to the ferry at Rosslare the next morning. Shortly before the priest had changed parishes, he had taken Peter and another young man to the Galway Races. At a guesthouse in Salthill, the priest shared a bed with the other young man, while Peter also slept in a single bed in the same room. He was forced to listen to their noises, he told Gardai.
His lurid confessions to the Gardai also detail Peter s own downward spiral into the abuse of others. Young men who paid visits to his mobile home in the priest s garden were molested as he enacted his sexual fantasies and homosexual obsessions. He described how he gave oral sex to one youngster while he was asleep in the caravan.
Another incident, in which he fondled a local boy, came to the attention of the priest, who stormed in and demanded to know whether Peter had done anything to the boy. In his panic at the prospect of the boy s parents finding out, the priest shouted: Oh, Jesus Christ, do you want me run out of the parish?
The priest s drink problem and short temper caused further tension between him and his lodger. One day Fr XXX said to Get the fucking key of the church, I want to say Mass . I told him to go and fuck himself . He said to get the hell out of this house or apologise . I felt depressed afterwards and I took a few bottles of tablets. The ambulance took me to hospital to be pumped out. It was not the only suicide attempt Peter had made in his life.
Peter became aware that he was a danger to young boys as his compulsion to act out his paedophiliac fantasies increased. It was perhaps because of a need to draw attention to himself that he abused two young boys in broad daylight in separate incidents.
On June 1, 1994, he saw a boy wearing short trousers and a t-shirt, cream or white socks and black shoes , in a laneway in Kilkenny town. He said to the boy: You re a nice boy and you have a nice bottom. He then molested the child, before returning to the priest s house. In another incident, he cycled to Tramore, Co. Waterford, took a boy of nine or ten years of age to a derelict house, and abused him.
Following his arrest, numerous attempts were made by the priest and others to persuade Peter to remain silent about his own abuse and to save the priest s good name . A probation worker visiting him after his arrest pleaded with him: After all the good times you have had with Fr XXX, now you had to turn against him. Peter said to the Gardai: I told him I was sick and tired of being abused since I was a little lad. He could be doing it to someone else.
Having been charged, Peter found himself in an all too familiar situation: nobody wanted him. He was rejected. Despite a number of undertakings, the South Eastern Health Board was accused of failing to provide proper accommodation for him. He remained in a psychiatric hospital during his trial and although he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, the judge ruled that prison was unsuitable for him.
Peter s legal team is now attempting to secure him the appropriate treatment and accommodation through the High Court. In the interim, Peter is in the care of the South Eastern Health Board. It will be responsible for his treatment, but not his behaviour.
Ironically, it was a South Eastern Health Board consultant psychiatrist who wrote the report detailing Peter s horrific life and his present mental condition. His diagnosis: Borderline mild mental handicap; personality problems; paedophilia pre-occupations.
The report states: At times during interview he would regress to the level of a five or six-year-old child, rubbing his head and repeating: (Peter) good boy, (Peter) good boy . He had a habit of rocking himself to sleep at night. n