October-November 2024 25
John McClean
O
n 15 November 2017, I received
an email from Gemma
O’Doherty, former features
editor of the Irish Independent
who had run several popular
stories in this magazine. She said she was
“wondering if you might be interested in a
piece about Terenure College and a sexual
abuse scandal that has secretly marred the
school for fifty years…I am aware of a
number of settlements made. I think this
has the potential to be explosive”.
Before that we had published a number
of stories from O’Doherty whom I had
always found easygoing and helpful. She
wrote strong, characteristically sensational,
stories for us and didn’t charge, which was
a bonus. I had no reason to suspect she had
offensive politics. In fact when I discussed
politics with her it was on the basis of the
progressive Village worldview. In any event
she never wrote about politics for us. At one
stage she explained her journalistic ethos
was to ask the questions. I would have
preferred one that tried to provide the
answers but it is not necessary to be ad
idem on a contributor’s ethos to publish her
news stories.
O’Doherty’s story was, she wrote, that:
“Former pupils who attended the school…
have alleged that a number of staff, both
priests and lay teachers, abused them. They
identify the same men repeatedly, claiming
these individuals engaged in warped
2017, when the
dam broke for
religious schools
Abuse in Terenure College, which had been reported to religious as far
back as 1979, was exposed by Gemma O’Doherty in 2017, but — partly
because she discredited herself — the authorities were slow to rally
By Michael Smith
NEWS
VillageOctNov24.indb 25 03/10/2024 14:27
26 October-November 2024
paedophile and sadistic behaviour but were
never held to account”.
The cover-up of all this dated back 40
years.
Des Harrison and Paul Downes were
school captain and prefect in sixth year in
Terenure in 1979. Downes had been
dropped from the rugby team in 1979,
though he had starred in the Senior-Cup-
winning team fully two years earlier. He was
not willing to put up with the trainer’s
abuse. That year, 1979, they went to the
school’s then principal, Prior Paul Graham,
about the trainer, John McClean, but Graham
ignored them and told the other prefects
that if there was another word about it there
would be trouble for them.
They were indefatigable. And not just in
that sorry era. Downes died on June 11 2018
after unsuccessfully asking prefects from
1979 and former pupils to accompany him
and Des Harrison to the Garda some months
after O’Doherty’s story appeared. Harrison
died shortly afterwards. Both died in
circumstances of stress and neglect.
O’Doherty inaccurately claimed Downes’
death was by suicide, in fact it was by
sudden heart attack, aged 57.
There are heroes all over the place if you
know where to look for them.
Those brave men first told their truth in
1979, 40 years before it was accepted.
While registering that, is informative also
to look at the state of knowledge about
abuse in Terenure in the mid-1990s, fifteen
years after their first frustrated
whistleblowing.
In a January 2024 article, another victim
of the College and another hero, Paul
Kennedy, wrote in Village:
“At the Terenure College Past Pupils
dinner in 1995 the alumni were anything
from five to fifty years out of the school:
some still boyish; some grizzled; a coterie
of wizened and grey.
There was a power cut.
In the dark some wag shouted: “Get yer
hand outa there Father!”. Laughter ensued,
quietened down and suddenly morphed
into a football-cheer-like chant of:
Paedophile, Paedophile, Paedophile,
(pause) Paedophile, (rising in volume)
PaeDO Phile… this was repeated for maybe
20 seconds. Suddenly power and light was
restored and the brave men in the dark
became boys again and went silent.
I looked up to the top table and saw Mr
McClean and Fathers Madden and Weakliam
looking out, challenging anyone to meet
their practised steely gazes.
Here’s the thing, all tables joined in and
it quickly became feral, it started as
laughter but became very dark, very
quickly”. Kennedy shows that everybody
knew.
By 1996 McClean himself had confessed
his abuse to Robert Kelly, the Carmelite
Provincial.
That McClean remained a pillar of
respectability for so long after the dogs in
the streets — and the Carmelite leaders —
knew, is a scandal.
After his confession. McClean left
Terenure to take a job in UCD schools rugby.
In general it is unfortunately the case that
the collegiate rugby community were late to
support the victims of Terenure.
For example Brian O’Driscoll, probably
Ireland’s best ever rugby player, who
figured in Village’s 2017 articles on McClean
pretends he only realised the problem in
2021, when McClean was convicted and
O’Driscoll told the Sunday World: “A bit like
everybody else over the course of the last
10 days particularly, as the levels have
come to light of the abuse, I have been as
shocked and appalled as everybody else
how he managed to get away with it for so
long”. In October 2017, admittedly just
before the Village pieces, O’Driscoll
credited McClean as fundamental to his
career. “I’ve had some great coaches and
some big coaches that taught me the
basics…but I definitely would say a guy
called John McClean was the most
influential”.
It is shocking how little was done for
thirty years after the mid-1990s. If it aims to
effect change it is to be hoped the
Commission of Inquiry will focus on the
apparent omerta.
Back to 2017: O’Doherty was pushing the
Garda to act. I know she did because she
first reported to me that they were doing
nothing and in the end was able to report
that they were finally acting. The change
happened while she was making inquiries
and she is a formidable operator.
In breaking the dam of abuse in religious
private schools, O’Doherty did the crucial
damage, in 2017.
She was, and remains, controversial.
Village on occasion touted the virtues of the
apparently anti-corruption but progressive
O’Doherty over a short period at the
beginning of 2017 while her politics seemed
to be limited to those two agendas. At that
time many others were also touting her.
They include Sinn Féin and the Social
Democrats, Michael D Higgins, the Irish
Times and the Guardian.
Village fell out with her when her now-
famous regressive platform emerged and
she put it in play for the Presidential 2018
election. We endorsed Higgins for the
election and wrote a cover story saying
Doherty was a ‘Conspiracy theorist and
racist’, leading to ludicrous threats of
litigation from her.
After the Village stories appeared, six or
eight individuals went to Detective Sergeant
Tom Stack. O’Doherty wrote to me: “The
main point about Stack and the gardai is
that they had a complaint about McClean in
1999. At least one, perhaps two. Then
In 1979, Downes nd
Hrrison wen o he
principl, Grhm,
bou McClen bu he
ignored hem. Agin
in 2018 hey ried o
mobilise vicims
Fr David Weakliam
VillageOctNov24.indb 26 03/10/2024 14:27
October-November 2024 27
What hppened 
Blckrock College ws
no unique. The dm, h
should hve broken hiry
yers erlier, broke for
Terenure in 2017’
another one came in in 2016. (There are
probably more that I don’t know about)”.
She might have noted that by 1999 McClean
had become a big noise in national student
rugby, for example accompanying the
Ireland Schools team during a 1996 summer
tour of Australia.
O’Doherty considered that; “At that point
they would have had a strong case because
they had at least two victims but they didn’t
inform victim 2 or the DPP that there were
earlier complaints. If Stack had done any
due diligence, he would have discovered
there were loads of victims of McClean out
there.
By any standards, McClean should have
been arrested by now. He is being
protected”.
She informed me that “When we
published our first piece, I put my email out
asking if victims of McClean would come
forward. At least ten did which is incredible
as they are all middle class professional
men - different classes, different
generations”.
History will record that up to this point
O’Doherty had done sterling work, despite
the later taint on her reputation.
Reflecting their lack of faith in the Garda,
some of the alleged victims thought it was
better to lodge complaints in other Garda
stations, including Crumlin and Celbridge
but they were directed back to Stack.
Perhaps directed by Garda Commissioner
Drew Harris, who probably knows a
professional thing or two about the horrors
of abuse, there was a change of the
investigating team in Terenure Garda
station. Stack was replaced by Detective
Sergeant Jason Miley who quickly gained a
name for being firm and fair both about
victims and suspects. Harris creditably
gave him six months and a backup team of
six.
Miley interviewed McClean for the first
time, and eventually arrested and charged
him in November 2018.
As was becoming increasingly the case ,
O’Doherty’s judgement from this point on
was terrible. She was prejudicing the Garda
case with her obsessive social media posts.
Some of the victims asked her to desist from
live streams. She wouldn’t talk to the Garda
herself, but told victims the Garda were
“corrupt, they’re laughing at you”.
The Garda had to ask the victims to
invervene with her.
Victims told her they had confidence in
Miley, and to stop.
In the Summer of 2018 many of the
victims were invited to meet Richard Byrne,
the Carmelites’ Provincial at Gort Mhuire,
its student and novitiate headquarters,
most of which it hurriedly flogged in 2019
for €35m.
Some of the victims were traumatised by
the meetings and left as soon as they had
told their stories, informing Byrne they
expected his co-operation in a criminal
trial. The victims were further traumatised
by the miserable deaths of Downes and
Harrison. One told Byrne “there’s a truth
bomb going to go off with the truth about
abuse in Terenure College”. Not surprisingly,
Byrne, a contemporary of several of the
victims, survived only eighteen months of
the normal three-year tenure, and was
replaced by Fr Michael Troy.
Some of the victims accepted payments
offered by the Carmelites of €60,000.
Most were unimpressed by the irony of
the Carmelites claiming the boys would be
destroyed if McClean’s case failed while at
the same time offering to pay out €60,000
to each of them. Coming a year after his
damning interview by Emily Maitlis but
before he paid £12m to Virginia Giuffre, it
was all just a bit ‘Prince Andrew’.
The Garda took records from Terenure
College but of course there was no evidence
of abuse or complaints about abuse.
Although McClean had confessed in 1996
to the Carmelites, at all stages of the Garda
investigation he denied all allegations
claiming they were co-ordinated
fabrications.
Nevertheless it appears boys who went to
the Garda were told that the only conviction
the Garda would be supporting would be
McClean.
McClean’s trial was due to start in
November 2020. He was denying all
charges. All victims steeled themselves for
a lengthy and traumatic trial.
However, one day before the trial they
were informed by the Garda that McClean
would be pleading guilty.
By 2021, when McClean was charged, the
mainstream media finally switched on to
wholesale abuse in private religious
schools in Ireland.
McClean was sentenced to eight years in
prison in February 2021 for the sexual
abuse of 23 boys in Terenure College
between 1973 and 1990.
Other schools and other victims had been
watching to see how the McClean affair and
trial played out.
A Facebook site was set up by brave
victims from Blackrock College.
In November 2022, the RTÉ Documentary
On One: Blackrock Boys was broadcast on
RTÉ Radio 1. The documentary described
the accounts of Mark and David Ryan, two
survivors of sexual abuse at Blackrock
College.
In response a Scoping Inquiry was
instigated in March 2023 by the Minister for
Education, Norma Foley, as a non-statutory
inquiry to organise a Survivor Engagement
process where those who had experienced
sexual abuse in day and boarding schools
run by religious orders were invited to come
forward and share their views regarding an
appropriate State response.
It was told of 2,395 allegations of
historical sexual abuse, involving 884
alleged abusers in 308 schools across all
parts of the country between the years 1927
to 2013. Most of these allegations have
been reported from the records of some 42
religious orders who currently or previously
ran schools in Ireland.
A Commission of Inquiry was established
in September 2024, following a
recommendation made by Senior Counsel,
Mary O’Toole, in her report to the Minister.
It is to be hoped it will get to grips with
the sloth of the Garda, the political classes
and the media in dealing with all this.
In September 2024, the solipsistic Irish
Times reported that “The dam burst when
the Ryan brothers came forward, but what
happened at Blackrock College was not
unique”.
What happened at Blackrock College was
indeed not unique; but the dam, that should
have broken thirty years earlier, broke in
2017.
VillageOctNov24.indb 27 03/10/2024 14:27

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