A former teacher has secured a High Court order preventing his trial on 25 charges of indecent assault against six former pupils in two Dublin national schools in the 1960s.
When granting the order of prohibition yesterday on grounds of unreasonable delay in making the complaints for which no satisfactory explanation was offered, Mr Justice Kearns criticised psychological evidence presented to support the DPP's claim that the delay in making the complaints of indecent assault was justified.
Reports prepared by a psychologist fell so far short of what was required in such cases as to be of virtually no value, he said. The psychologist herself had accepted there were significant shortcomings in her evidence.
However, the judge also noted that the psychologist was asked to conduct each consultation and prepare a report on each complainant for a fee of €170, which the judge described as highly unsatisfactory for any professional person, especially one engaged in work of such a sensitive nature.
He was giving his reserved judgment on judicial review proceedings brought by the teacher, who is elderly and was described as having considerable health problems. The complaints related to alleged incidents of assault in one northside school in 1964-1966 and assaults in a school on the southside in 1967-1968.
The judge said some 20 former pupils of the northside school had been interviewed, and none had supported the claims made regarding the alleged incidents there. In relation to the second school, no complaints were made at the time of the alleged assaults and teachers employed there then were, the applicant alleged, either dead or untraceable.
The first complaint alleging assault was made in 1994 and the rest in the following two years. The applicant, who was still teaching into the 1990s, was arrested and charged in December 1997. He was returned for trial in 1999.
The applicant alleged there was gross and inordinate delay in making the complaints and also prosecutorial delay, which created a real risk of an unfair trial.
In such a case, the psychological evidence adduced to explain the delay in making complaints was critical, the judge said. However, expert evidence could not be accepted if based on unverified facts, broad assumptions and generalisations.
In this case, the reports and evidence of the clinical psychologist fell well short of what was required. Addendums had to be requested for her reports, but these were not based on further consultation and instead she had made one telephone call to each complainant. In one case she had telephoned a complainant's wife to discuss his sexual difficulties.
The psychologist had agreed in evidence that this was unsatisfactory, the judge said. Another difficulty was that her interviews with the complainants were not recorded, and she had written down replies to her questions as she interviewed and made notes. No psychological testing had been done. Her reports were largely a reporting exercise of what was stated to her rather than a psychological evaluation.
The judge said there was no satisfactory explanation advanced for the delay in making the complaints. He was satisfied this was an appropriate case for granting an order of prohibition.