Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Jail sentence is ‘justice of a sort’ for victim
THE man whose testimony helped the Mirror track down football paedophile Jim Mccafferty has told of his links to serial beasts ex-crewe coach Barry Bennell and former Celtic Boys’ Club coach Jim Torbett.
The victim, now 50, has spoken of the trauma of being systematically abused by evil Mccafferty.
He was repeatedly targeted as a child in the early 80s when he was aged between 14 and 15. As a player
with Netherdale Boys’ Club in Lanarkshire the victim was sexually assaulted by Mccafferty, who would run him home but drive on the back roads, pull over to a layby and carry out the abuse.
Welcoming Mccafferty’s guilty plea, he said: “This is everything. This is some sort of closure after all these decades. It is relief. It is some reward. It is justice of a sort.
“Having never spoken about it for 35 years, I’m now quite open about it.
It will never leave me. To me it is like it only happened last week. My life, from being a teenager until the present, has been ruined, but you can’t turn the clock back.
“I’d never heard of grooming or even what it was. But looking back now, this is exactly what he was doing in my case.”
The victim suffered years
of depression and alcohol abuse, before turning his life around. He bravely reported Mccafferty in 2016 after watching a TV report about football coach Bennell, who was convicted of several counts of abuse against children in England.
He added: ”I thought, ‘Oh my God, I know
Barry Bennell. Mccafferty
took us to meet Barry Bennell at Crewe’. I could put the connection in there. And I could put the connection in with Jim Torbett.
“After 30 years I’d never mentioned this to anyone, not even my family. God knows why, but after all that time I picked the phone up and phoned the Daily Record.
“I was thinking of all the ones since. I thought if I had made this public sooner, I could have stopped others being abused. I felt very guilty.”