TOM DOORLEY:
Reading about Terenure College paedophile John McClean last week stirred up very unpleasant memories for Tom Doorley, who spoke to several of his former classmates about the horrific abuse they also suffered
WE HAD OUR OWN MONSTER BUT I WAS ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES
ON A fine afternoon in June 1977, I walked out of my school for the last time as a pupil. I had just sat my Leaving Cert economic history exam and I’d been the only candidate. The place was eerily quiet as I headed towards the big iron gates and suddenly saw the outline of the school bully looming towards me, silhouetted against the sunshine.
This was not a boy, it was a Jesuit priest and a predatory paedophile. During much of the 1970s, he had bestrode the school like a priapic colossus and everyone — including, as I know now, his fellow priests — lived in fear of him.
A few years ago, I tried my hand at writing a novel set in a very familiar school, featuring a familiarly monstrous teacher. Aspiring novelists are told to write about what we know. I named this character Father Oliphant, after a longvanished shop on Drumcondra Road; it sounded vaguely exotic, like his own surname.
And although he is long dead, I’m going to call him Father Oliphant here.
He had nephews in the school, all of whom were very pleasant and obviously blameless boys, at least one of whom had a very hard time because of his accident of birth.
Anyway, Oliphant approached and I realised, once again and vividly, that I hated him but that he no longer had any power over me. I looked straight ahead, and walked past in silence.
‘Thomas, I saluted you,’ I heard from behind me.
My stomach turned over and my heart started racing. Somehow, I managed to turn around and face him for a moment. ‘I know you did,’ I said, and walked off.
I can’t remember when I stopped trembling.
In the wake of John McClean’s conviction last week and the revelations about this serial abuser’s activities at Terenure College, I said on Twitter that we had had our own monster at Belvedere in my time. Over a dozen people contacted me to share their memories of what had happened to them and to their friends.
My dismissal of Oliphant on that last day of school felt terrifying at the time, but I was one of the lucky ones. Yes, I ascribe my lasting phobia of reading in public to him and he did write a message in felt-tip on my bare chest in front of the class when I was 15 but I got off very lightly.
For a long time he seemed vaguely to like me but, not in ‘that’ way. As I got older, I recognised him for what he was: a bully to everyone and a very particular menace to the little boys who formed the ‘female’ chorus in his annual Strauss operettas.
When anyone who had been at Belvedere in the 1970s read the newspaper reports of McClean measuring young boys, stark naked and alone, for costumes that never fitted properly, we instantly recognised the gambit shared by the two paedophiles.
Oliphant was large by any standards. His hands, of which he was very proud, were like hams, his head like a pumpkin, although parents would sometimes say that he was a fine-looking man. But when you were in First Grammar — first year in the arcane nomenclature of Jesuit schools — he could block out the sun, literally and metaphorically.
A talented linguist and a brilliant teacher, he was immensely clever and could call on limitless reserves of charm when he wanted to.
In that cynically subversive way that can be so attractive to teenage boys, he would speak slightingly of other teachers and even impute pederastic tendencies to several blameless men, one of who he used refer to as ‘Mary’, often in his presence.
The testimonies of those men who, when they were 12 or 13, underwent Oliphant’s costume measuring routine are all essentially the same.
Conor (not his real name) recalls: ‘He would take you, on your own, up to this room full of old clothes and there was a screen in the corner. He’d tell you to strip, underpants and all, and when you were completely bare and feeling really bloody awkward and embarrassed, he’d help you on with a pair of tights — like nylons, you could see everything through them. Then he’d tell you to stay there, sitting on one of those grey, plastic chairs while he went behind the screen for what seemed like ages.
‘It was obvious what he was doing there because he’d emerge all sweaty and kind of flustered and tell you, a bit sharply, to get dressed. But I don’t think he ever actually touched anyone. At least, I never heard that.’
Tim (again, not his real name) told me: ‘The little fellows’ chorus was divided in two and to put it bluntly, the pretty kids were chosen to be “girls” and the plain ones, like me, got to be boys. It was the pretty kids who got measured.’
Conor, again, recalls: ‘It just felt weird, sitting there, starkers. But when you’re 12 and you’re new to the Senior House, you think, well, maybe this is just normal here.
‘I’m big, you’re tiny, and I have all the power’
Now I realise he was looking at me from behind that screen while he pleasured himself. I feel sick, to be honest.’
‘It was all about power,’ Luke (not his own name) told me. ‘I had a good voice in first year and I have this memory of being alone with him doing scales and it was dead quiet. Suddenly he spread his hand out on the table and it was huge. He said, “put your hand on top”, and I put my tiny hand on his. He didn’t say a word but he didn’t need to. It was, “I’m big, you’re tiny, and I have all the power.”’
This was a common experience. The favoured boys in Oliphant’s German classes would be invited to spend a few weeks in August in Vienna. Usually they would be required to go through Confession with him. Darragh (not his real name) recalls: ‘When I was in first year an older boy told me that if Oliphant asks if you masturbate you say, “I don’t know father, but I’ll ask my parents.”’ Darragh used this ploy and was left firmly alone.
In Vienna he would tell boys ‘masturbation is a sin, but not if you do it in your sleep’. On the pretext of ‘checking for a rash’ he had Keith (not his real name) strip in his room for a thorough examination. ‘He said I seemed to have a tightness “there” and that I should try to loosen it. I remember he was wielding a tube of Savlon and I had to think fast. I said, “wouldn’t that be masturbation, Father?” There was a silence for a minute and he said, yes, maybe I was right.’
It was in Vienna that the most sinister part of the Oliphant saga unfolded. He was constantly alert for any sign of a cough or cold or a temperature, which some, but not all, remember as being checked rectally. Two of the boys on whom he preyed told friends that on the pretext of some mild or imaginary illness, they were required to sleep in Oliphant’s room. They were given ‘medicine’ and have no recollection of the next 36 hours. It seems likely that others went through the same ordeal.
Keith told me: ‘I’m still amazed that after what I’d experienced, I went back the next year. Somehow it felt better to be in the inner circle, to be approved of, instead of outside, where most people were. It made you feel special, which is, frankly, horrifying.’ Another, who preferred not to talk in detail about his experiences, told me: ‘That b ***** d couldn’t get enough of me. He tried to sleep with me in Vienna.’ On the very rare occasions when a boy dared to challenge what Oliphant was doing — and very few had the courage to do so — his response was always the same: ‘I’ll deny everything.’ In fact, whenever a boy was summoned from one of his classes to see the head master he would always say, jokingly, ‘deny everything’. Keith told an older boy what had happened to him and the response was, ‘if that gets out, you’ll have to leave the school’. As Keith says, ‘he was just a kid, but it was terrifying’. By the start of the autumn term in 1977, matters were coming to a head for Oliphant. One boy, who had not been abused, reported the conversations he had had with those who had been. One of them was Keith, who was summoned by the head master and asked if the story was true. ‘Of course, I panicked. I did exactly what he always said. I denied everything,’ recalls Keith. Another boy who was questioned told me: ‘I probably would have been believed — I know that now. But I was 13 and I was scared of that b ***** d and I was scared that I’d get into trouble, that I’d be seen as doing something wrong.
‘So, yes, I said it wasn’t true. There was always this sense of menace when he was in the room. Actually there was a sense of menace when he wasn’t there. You just had to think of him.’
I used to wonder how it took the school so long to take action but now I think I know. Such was this man’s hold over virtually everyone that boys lied for him. But it seems that the head master had the wisdom to see through this.
He placed ‘Mary’ in charge of the opera, with Oliphant reduced to playing the piano. At the end of the academic year, he was sent to Gardiner Street parish as a curate, still uncomfortably close to the school.
The boys who had accused him were told to report any further bullying or inappropriate behaviour and none, it seems, occurred.
‘He would still stand in the corner of the schoolyard, preening himself, against the Junior House steps,’ recalls one of those he had abused. ‘A few acolytes still stood around him. But everyone knew he was finished. It was around that time that we started calling him The Turd. How’s that for revulsion?’
Keith recalls having to face him every day after being abused.
‘I have vivid memories of him in English class spending a disproportionate amount of time during Macbeth lessons on the theme of Jesuitical casuistry, the irony of which will not be lost on anyone. I do remember a favourite quote of his was actually from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” You’re left wondering who were the flies and who the gods in his particular scenario.’
There is no doubt he destroyed lives. One boy was so badly bullied in class that he could never recite a poem or speak in public. ‘That man ruined my teens and my 20s. I will tell you what he did to me, but please don’t write about it.’
He was violent too. It was said that he had kicked down a door and broken a boy’s jaw when he was teaching at Clongowes. And it was rumoured, when he suffered a fracture in the early 1970s, that he had been beaten up by four of his former victims from there.
When I was 15, I found a first year crying outside the music room. Oliphant had not taken kindly to a remark and had literally thrown him out. He landed where I found him in a mess of dust and tears.
He became a great friend and Oliphant would direct his laser-like stare at us in the yard, but we revelled in it. He hated to see older boys talking with younger ones. He feared what would be revealed.
This friend died young and I recall saying to his mother who, in turn, became a great friend, that I had the gift of these great friendships to thank the monster for.
It is said that Oliphant caused at least one suicide, several instances of alcoholism, drug abuse leading to homelessness in one case and, in the words of one survivor, ‘plenty of mental scars that will never go away. He gloried in cruelty. Do you remember he’d always identify the shy, quiet, vulnerable boy in each class and then he’d regularly say “go on, get so-and-so” and, God forgive us, we would. At the time we thought it was just horseplay but God almighty, just think of what that did to people.’
The people with whom I spoke were all survivors, ones who somehow got through the varying degrees and kinds of abuse. Most of them are conspicuously successful in their fields, high achievers.
I asked one of them why this was. ‘Maybe it’s because we just couldn’t bear to let that f ***** win.’ I’m sure that’s true, but I know that some fell by the wayside.
One old school friend of mine asked me why I was writing this. I said I just wanted these stories told. These events happened the better part of half a century ago but they need to be known.
‘You know he groped my scrotum,’ he said. ‘And to her dying day my mother used to say that there’s never been a whiff of scandal about the Jesuits! I didn’t disabuse her.’
This Jesuit died in 2000, aged 75, shameless to the end.
‘Such was this man’s hold that boys lied for him’