The clergyman who sexually abused Brennan left his teaching job, but was made a parish priest
All names and identifying details have been changed.
Participants have given us permission to share their experiences.
Brennan was sexually abused by a Catholic priest who was a teacher at his primary school.
He says that even after 70 years ‘not a week goes by but that I don’t think of it’.
Brennan’s father died when he was a young child. He and his brother attended a Catholic primary school.
One of the teachers was a priest called Father O’Brien. He taught several subjects and he lived at the school. The priest would select boys and invite them to visit him in his room for ‘extra help’ with their studies. Brennan was chosen several times.
Brennan describes going to Father O’Brien’s large bedsit-type room on one occasion, and finding there were already about six boys there. Some of them were reading comic books. Father O’Brien was sitting on a sofa and told Brennan to come and sit next to him.
The priest began to touch Brennan, and then asked him to sit on his lap, and continued touching him. Brennan says he felt uncomfortable and tried to move away, but Father O’Brien told him that it was ‘fine’ and that the other boys ‘didn’t mind’.
On another occasion when Father O’Brien asked him to go to his room, Brennan remembers not wanting to go, but the priest insisted he needed extra help with his work. He remembers the same situation – being asked to sit on Father O’Brien’s lap and feeling very uncomfortable, but because he was so young he felt unable to get up and say that he didn’t want to do it.
After this, Brennan was determined he would not go to the priest’s room again, and he made excuses when Father O’Brien asked him.
A while later, during a lesson, Father O’Brien asked Brennan to collect some books from the library. The priest followed Brennan and told him to climb up the shelves to get them. As he did this, Father O’Brien began to touch him and ‘would not let go’.
Brennan says he became ‘hysterical’. He jumped down and ran out of the school. He returned later and went to speak to another priest, who he describes as ‘kind and gentle’. Brennan told the priest what had happened and the priest explained that he was going to see the headmaster.
When the priest returned, he told Brennan to go home. Soon after, Brennan’s mother received a letter from the headmaster telling Brennan to stay at home until the start of the next term.
When he returned to school after the holiday, Father O’Brien had left. Soon after, Brennan discovered that Father O’Brien had become the priest in a nearby parish.
Brennan says he never told anyone else about the abuse, nor was it mentioned again by anyone at school.
Now an elderly man, Brennan says he still frequently thinks about the abuse. He has flashbacks and can visualise Father O’Brien ‘as though it was yesterday’. ‘It doesn’t leave you’ he adds.
He says he ‘loathed school’ after he was abused, and left in his mid teens with no qualifications. He is uncomfortable having physical contact with other people and tries to avoid it. He has relatives who he describes as ‘touchy feely’ and he has to force himself to let them hug him.
He feels it should not be allowed for a school to be faith-dominated with single, unattached teachers, and adds that it was wrong that a known paedophile was simply moved to another parish.
Brennan has tried to deal with his experiences on his own without help. He said in his generation, sexual abuse of children ‘was not really talked about’. He threw himself into his career, has had a very successful working life, and has focused on his family.