Did school serve children or fantasies of perverts?

WITH child abuse complaints made against 44 priests, the Jesuits now join the shameful list of religious orders that prized shielding their organisation’s reputation over the welfare of children. Indeed, coming so long after similar scandals hit the Christian

Brothers, the Spiritans and the Carmelites, it might be assumed the Jesuits were more ruthlessly committed to preserving their good name than most.

The original hope that Fr Joseph Marmion was a lone wolf – a single predatory paedophile in a sea of good men – has been torpedoed by this week’s revelations. Not only that but the disclosure of how another priest who has a complaint of sex abuse against him, Fr Paul Andrews, assisted in the Marmion coverup is arguably a new low. Fr Andrews, a child psychologist, was closely involved with St Declan’s School in Ballsbridge, Dublin, set up in the 1950s by Fr Dermot Casey, another psychologist with 17 complaints of child sexual abuse to his name. St Declan’s was a school like no other in Dublin. Long before special needs were heard of, it helped kids who were floundering at school due to learning or emotional difficulties.

A former pupil of Fr Marmion has described how he targeted

‘children with health issues, children who didn’t have brothers in the school, kids whose families wouldn’t have been wealthy, children who weren’t physically strong’. But St Declan’s pupils were often the most vulnerable of all. That two alleged paedophiles held powerful positions in the school raises the question as to whether it served the interests of special needs children, or the dark fantasies of perverts.