African nurse sues Irish missionary priest for sex abuse
AN AFRICAN man who claims he was abused by an Irish missionary priest will begin a civil case for damages in the High Court tomorrow.
In the first case of its kind, Elvis Kuteh, 50, originally from Sierra Leone, will travel to Dublin to pursue the case against former priest, Henry Moloney and the Spiritan order.
Mr Kuteh claims that Moloney sexually abused him while he was a student at a school run by the Spiritans in Sierra Leone in the late 1970s.
He is suing the Spiritan congregation for damages. It is the first time a survivor of alleged abuse in Africa will take a case in the Irish courts.
Moloney, 77, is serving a four-year sentence for inde- cently assaulting a secondary school student at Rockwell College in Tipperary in the 1980s.
The Irish Mail on Sunday revealed in December that Moloney had stayed on the grounds of his former school in Tipperary while on trial for abuse at the same school.
The Holy Ghost Fathers confirmed to the MoS that they did not inform the board of management or the school principal that the sex abuser was staying at the prestigious Tipperary boarding school.
Mr Kuteh, who is now a psychiatric nurse living in London, is taking the case under the Brussels Convention whereby defendants can be pursued for losses incurred outside the Council of Europe member states.
He is claiming severe personal injuries, mental health distress, losses and damage arising from sexual assaults perpetrated by Moloney (who was laicised in January 2015) when he was a teacher and boarding master at Christ the King College in Bo, Sierra Leone’s second largest city from 1973 to 1979. The claim is also against the Spiritan congregation – or Holy Ghost Fathers – for having placed an alleged child sexual abuser at the college in Sierra Leone.
Mr Mark Vincent Healy, who was sexually abused by Moloney while he was a student at the exclusive St Mary’s College in Rathmines, Dublin, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is supporting Mr Kuteh in his case.
He says the landmark proceedings could pave the way for more complainants in Africa to seek jus- tice in European jurisdictions.
‘This could be the tip of the iceberg. Many, many Irish men and women went out to Africa as missionaries and the vast majority did only good,’ says Mr Healy.
‘But we also have these terrible cases where known abusers here were sent out to Africa where they coyntinued to abuse.
‘The devastation they caused there is hard to quantify but I would be surprised if this is the only case we see of this kind.
‘The last opportunity of raising this important issue of missionary child sexual abuse was in the RTÉ documentary programme called Mission to Prey in 2011 which scuppered and strangled any further debate in Ireland about this issue of clerical child sexual abuse by missionaries.
‘The false allegations raised against Fr Kevin Reynolds completely took the focus and the media, by and large, has kept well away from the topic since.’
Moloney has four previous sex abuse convictions for which he was given prison sentences.
In 2000, he was sentenced to 18 months for sexually assaulting two boys, including Mr Healy, at St Mary’s College in Rathmines during the early 1970s. He served 15 months. He had been the dean of discipline and junior form tutor at St Mary’s, where he also coached boys in rugby.
In 2009 he pleaded guilty to abusing two other boys at the same Dublin school during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was given an 18-month sentence which was suspended for three years.
During the Rockwell College abuse trial, late last year, it emerged that the former teacher had told the Pope in a letter in 2014 he had a history of ‘abusing young boys’, although he denied all the charges at the trial.
Despite being put under the supervision of his order, just 18 months after his criminal conviction in 2009 he managed to gain access to the internet in October 2010.
In one of his postings on the blog Catholic Answers, he wrote: ‘The vast majority of child sexual abusers cannot be rehabilitated and they are and will remain a danger to children as long as they live.’
Moloney is serving a four-year sentence ‘This could be the tip of the iceberg’