Pizzas galore!

()THE full horror of how children were systematically abused in the 100,000-strong diocese of Ferns was unleashed last Tuesday. Much of the abuse was already in the public domain, but the devil lurked in the minute details of new and even well-known allegations laid bare in the report.

By the early 1990s several Ferns priests were already household names because of their abuse of local children. Fortune, whose reign of terror began in the 1970s during his days as a seminarian, was the diocese’s most prolific abuser. He continually raped boys, even after complaints were made about his behaviour, molesting them at boarding school, on youth retreats, at his home, in public toilets, even in a radio studio. When Ian, 16, asked the media-savvy priest to teach him how to operate a sound desk, Fortune pinned him to the desk and buggered him.

Fortune, two of whose victims took their own lives, committed suicide in 1999 awaiting 66 charges of abuse against young boys.

Only two of his 20 abusing colleagues were convicted. Fr James Doyle, who also targeted teenage hitchhikers and began abusing young boys when he was a seminarian, was jailed after sexually assaulting a 12-year-old boy in his family home. The assault was stopped after the boy’s father heard his son’s screams from the bathroom.

Fr Donal Collins, a teacher at St Peter’s College in Wexford, plied his victims with alcohol. Under the guise of the young scientist of the year competition, the priest enticed young boys to his room where he abused them. On one occasion, he molested 20 boys in one sitting. Collins was given a three-month suspended sentence for his crimes.

Many of the abusers in Ferns died before their victims could secure justice. Canon Martin Clancy, a school manager who used his music and sex education classes to abuse girls, died before his crimes were exposed.

One child, Ciara, who was abused by the cleric from the age of 11, gave birth to his daughter Rachel at the age of 14. In 1993, when he died, Clancy left Ciara £3,000 to be used for her “musical pursuits”.

Fr James Grennan left behind a divided community when he died in 1994. Six years earlier the Monageer parish priest abused 10 young girls — all under the age of 13 — during confession on the altar. When he returned to his church two weeks later to celebrate confirmation, several families walked out in protest.

Brendan Comiskey, the then bishop of Ferns, dismissed the complaints and joined Grennan on the altar to celebrate “a very joyful, happy, sunny summer day”. Investigating gardai “lost” vital files containing the girls’ complaints. Grennan continued to abuse. The day after he died a teenage boy attempted suicide.

“I’m just living to die, in the hope that I will find happiness in the next life,” said Rosemary, 42, who was raped from the age of eight for four years by a Ferns priest who is now dead. Rosemary endured repeated rapes in his presbytery to spare her younger sisters a similiar ordeal.

“They’re still getting away with it. Even today there are miracles attributed to the beast who abused me,” she said. “He is revered and even though he is dead he can’t be named. What horrifies me most is that this all could have been stopped years ago.”

Indeed it could. Last week’s report from the inquiry, led by Frank Murphy, a retired Supreme Court judge, observed that several serial abusers, including Fortune, had already started abusing children during their priestly formation.

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