JOHN LEACY will never forget the nights that he spent lying in his bed as a child, listening for the approaching footsteps of Br Aidan Clohessy.
‘It would put the hair up on your back. That’s the way it was,’ he recalls.
When they came, the footsteps would move up the stairs to the landing, pause and then continue, heading into the nearby bathroom.
Listening in the darkness, John would hear the taps in the bathroom running as Br Aidan prepared himself for what was to come.
Beneath his blanket, John never knew until the footsteps approached his own bedroom door whether it would be his turn – or if he’d be lucky that night.
‘You never had a sleep,’ the now 66-year-old Co. Wexford man told the Irish Mail on Sunday this week.
‘You’d be roaring your head off and you’d be all tensed up’
‘You could never settle down in your bed because you didn’t know what time he was going to come to you.’
Often – twice a week at times – as John held his breath, it was his door the steps would come to.
Then he knew it was his turn. ‘He’d tip you on the head and he would say, “You come with me now.”
‘He’d get you out of bed and bring you downstairs. He’d be in his jocks.’
Downstairs, Br Aidan would pull John’s night clothes off, and the abuse would begin.
‘He pulled the pyjamas off me many times. Many, many times’
Other boys knew about the abuse but no one spoke about it openly.
‘How’d you get on with him last night?’ was as close as anyone might come to acknowledging the terror that they all lived with.
It was a question no one ever answered straight. John is the eldest of five children. Because he was a slow learner, he was sent to St Augustine’s special school in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, in September 1970 at the age of 13.
He is sure of that date because it was the same month his grandfather – whom he simply called Pa – died.
Pa had never wanted for his grandson to be sent to attend St Augustine’s.
But when his grandfather died, John’s fate was sealed. ‘We went up in a little Mini. My uncle drove the car and my father came and my mother came.’
When they got there, one of the St John of God brothers brought John out to see the playing fields as his parents slipped away.
‘I remember I looked around and my parents were gone. I never said goodbye to them. I started crying then.’
He soon came to the attention of the feared school principal. And after some time – perhaps months later – Br Aidan began to abuse the vulnerable boy.
‘He’d bring you over by the hands. You’d have your pyjamas on you and he’d pull you across him… He’d beat you on the arse and start rubbing you. He’d say, “open up your legs.”
‘You’d be terrified, you know. You’d be all tensed up. He’d be at you there for a good 10 minutes.
‘You’d be roaring your head off. You’d be crying. You didn’t know what was coming. You’d be saying to him: “Stop, stop, stop.”‘ Another assault occurred in the school library after John broke into a storeroom with another pupil and stole bottles of Guinness.
‘At the end of the table he stripped me naked. He stripped all the clothes off me, trousers and all, down to the bare arse and spread me legs out… He used the belt now that time.’
Another brother was present in the room at the time, but he said and did nothing.
‘They were afraid of him,’ recalls John. ‘He was the head man there at that time.
‘[Br Clohessy] was the law… No one ever stopped him. Never.’
John was due to go home that weekend but couldn’t because of the injuries to his body.
‘Me parents would have seen the state I was in.’
As a boarder, John only went home for Christmas and during school holidays.
After each trip home, he would hide to try to avoid being sent back to St Augustine’s.
‘When I was going back to school, I used to hide my bags and run away. I’d plead with my mother not to go back to school. I didn’t want to go back.
‘I said: “Mommy, I’m not going back, I’m just not going back.”
‘People around the area would come to see you to say, “John, go back. For your mother’s sake. You’ll get on all right.” You cried the whole way back on the bus.’
With no other choice, John simply endured what he had to.
‘I got strong in the place. I got to hate him and grew harder.
You just get hard then. Strong, tough in your ways because you had to face this for another three or four months, you know.’
When he got older John was moved into a house that had a front door which opened directly onto Carysfort Avenue. Pupils at St Augustine’s referred to it as ‘the big house’.
Br Aidan had a room there too. It was in this house – long since demolished – that John would again lie awake at night, listening for the approaching footsteps.
‘That’s where I got the heavy going with him,’ is how John describes this period.
Then, one night after being brought downstairs, John said he simply snapped.
Naked and terrified, he lunged at Br Aidan, knocking him off his chair backwards.
John then made a run for the house’s front door and burst out into Carysfort Avenue.
‘I had nothing on me at all. I had no underpants or anything on me. I went out the front door. I’ll never forget it.’
Br Aidan coaxed him back inside, and, all this happened in the middle of the night, no one was about. No one saw a thing.
But after that, Br Aidan didn’t come to John’s door anymore.
At the age of 17, John left St Augustine’s and he got a job in Wexford in gardening, then going on to excel in the building trade.
He worked hard. But he drank hard too.
‘I went to drink – heavy drinking. I was drinking 20 pints a day.’
With a now-estranged partner, he had five children. But he wasn’t right. ‘I was never myself, like. I had so much built up inside I had no love to give, the way that I was.’
He had no love for himself either. ‘I went about committing suicide. I had the rope around my neck.’
But his daughter walked into the garage and saw him: ‘She started crying. She saved my life, really.’
That was 12 or 13 years ago. He began to get help, but the drinking continued. Eventually, in 2022 it nearly killed him as he was hospitalised in a coma for months.
Sober for the first time and recovering in bed at home, he was dumbfounded when he saw Br Aidan’s face on the television news.
‘I said, “You bastard. You’re back in Ireland.”‘
It was October 2022, and Clohessy had just been charged with abusing others at St Augustine’s – a crime he is now in prison for.
Until that moment, John thought his abuser was dead.
Towards the end of her life, when his mother finally began to believe him, she asked John to complain to the local priest. But thinking his tormentor was dead, he told her: ‘No, it’s too late now.’
In earlier years – during his adult life – John even went as far as seeking Clohessy out at St Augustine’s to confront him ‘I remember I met a man. He was actually a caretaker in the school at the time. “Oh,” says he, “Br Aidan is gone out of here. He’s gone to Africa.”‘ John asked the caretaker if Clohessy would be coming back.
‘No,’ he was told. ‘He’ll never be coming back here.’
John immediately thought of the children that Br Aidan would inevitably be coming into contact with in Africa.
‘It was a disgrace what they [St John of God] did there – sending a man in that condition to do more damage out there.
‘I was a strong enough fella and it still near put me in a mental home.
‘I thought, “God love those children out in Africa.” I did. He wasn’t going to change.
‘But at that time, you could go no place. The guards wouldn’t look at it. It wasn’t talked about.’
After seeing Br Aidan on the news, John contacted the Wexford Rape Crisis Centre.
‘They were very good to me. I’m with them ever since.’
Soon he was meeting with the same Garda team that have successfully prosecuted Clohessy.
But now, nearly three years later, there has still been no decision from the DPP.
John did not even know that his childhood tormentor had gone on trial: ‘I didn’t know that the case was going on.’
Then, a garda detective friend of John’s from Cork rang and told him Clohessy was in jail.
‘Jaysus, to tell you the truth, I felt a new man.’
John wants the same thing every other victim of Br Aidan Clohessy wants – justice.
He said that he was initially too embarrassed to talk about the abuse he suffered: ‘I was like a f***ing victim’ – but now I don’t give a damn.’
Being from Wexford, John knows all about the scandal of Fr Sean Fortune, which resulted in the Ferns Inquiry.
In that instance, Fr Fortune was moved around by his superiors – who included Bishop Brendan Comiskey – and was subsequently left free to abuse others.
To John’s mind, there is little difference between people like Bishop Comiskey and those who were responsible for sending Br Aidan to Africa.
Ultimately, Bishop Comiskey resigned in 2002 following the airing of the BBC documentary Suing the Pope.
John believes that Donatus Forkan – the head of the St John of God order and the person who had sent Br Aidan to serve in Malawi – should also resign.
‘What went on there was a big cover up, the same as the bishops. The man [Donatus Forkan] shouldn’t still be there. Sure, it’s the same as Brendan Comiskey.’
michaelofarrell@protonmail.com
