9 April 2006

Madam,
Writing in the Irish Times on 29 March last, the director of “One in Four” Colm O’Gorman made some remarkable statements in an article headed “There is no evidence to show that the rights of those accused have been abused”.

Mr O’Gorman stated: “In the past few months a number of commentators have suggested that grave injustice is being done to priests falsely accused of child sexual abuse. Such suggestions rightly concern fair minded people, but remarkably, no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest that false allegations are being made or that the rights of those accused are being abused.”

Did Mr. O’Gorman never hear of the case of Nora Wall, formerly Sister Dominic of the Sisters of Mercy? In 1999 she became the first woman in the history of the State to be convicted of raping a child AND the first person to get a life sentence for rape. She was also the first person to be convicted on the basis of “Recovered Memory Syndrome”. (This kind of evidence is very rare in Ireland but has a long and infamous history in the USA).

Nora Wall was convicted on the word of two women Regina Walsh and her “witness” Patricia Phelan, BOTH of whom had made a string of allegations against other people (mainly relatives and boyfriends). The case started to collapse when they sold their story to The Star newspaper and one of the men who had been accused by Patricia Phelan read it and contacted Nora Wall’s family. In December 2005 in the Court of Criminal Appeal, Patricia Phelan finally confessed publicly that she had lied.

In the same newspaper article Regina Walsh stated that she had also been raped by a “black man in Leicester Square”. Again it was the first the Defence had heard of this allegation.

At the trial Regina Walsh claimed that one of the rapes occurred on her 12th birthday. She said that Nora Wall held her down while Pablo McCabe raped her. Pablo McCabe was in Mountjoy Prison on that date!! When this was pointed out to the jury they acquitted the two accused on that charge but convicted them on the other allegations. I believe that the only reason for this incredible decision is that Nora Wall had been a nun. Does Colm O’Gorman have an alternative explanation?

Mr. O’Gorman might like to look at the Judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeal on the Nora Wall case. It is dated 16 December 2005 and is readily available on the Internet.

But perhaps the Nora Wall case is just an aberration? Consider the following.

There are wild claims that the Christian Brothers and other religious have murdered up to ‘hundreds’ of the boys in their care. (For example an interview with Mannix Flynn about Letterfrack Industrial School in the Sunday Independent on 22 December 2002). Gardai at Clifden, Co Galway, investigated claims that there were bodies of boys who had died as a result of foul play buried in the grounds of Letterfrack. Early in 2003, the Gardai reported that they had found no evidence to back this up. Superintendent Tony O’Dowd said: “There was no evidence available that would suggest that foul play led to the deaths of anybody buried inside or outside of the cemetery at the old Industrial School in Letterfrack.” He added: “There was no evidence of a mass grave.”

Then there was the case of former Letterfrack resident, Willie Delaney. His body was exhumed in April 2001 because of claims that he had died as a result of head wounds inflicted by a Christian Brother. The subsequent autopsy revealed that he had died from natural causes and that there was no evidence of a blow to the head.

The list goes on. Patrick Flaherty, who spent some years in the Holy Family School in Renmore, Co Galway said he made two allegations against members of the Brothers of Charity because of ‘false memory syndrome’. He later withdrew the allegations. He has also said that while attending a public meeting of the Laffoy Commission in 2003 he overheard other former residents discussing among themselves whether or not to accuse a particular Brother. Some in the group said the Brother had never abused anyone. Others said he should be accused anyway.

The evidence of Patrick Flaherty was not widely reported in the media (I saw it in the Irish Independent on 1st November 2003 and nowhere else). However as head of “One in Four”, surely Colm O’Gorman should be aware of it?

There is no way that Mr. O’Gorman can have missed the allegations about the “killing” of Willie Delaney. The media screamed obscenities at the Christian Brothers. About 20 April 2001, Evening Herald posters were all over the streets of Dublin proclaiming “Now it’s Murder Enquiry”. Then the autopsy report was published and the entire media dropped the story like a shot. Yet this was a Blood Libel against the Christian Brothers which was no different from Nazi Blood Libels about the Jews.

Did Colm O’Gorman have anything to say at the time? Will he say something now? How can he possibly maintain that “no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest that false allegations are being made or that the rights of those accused are being abused.”