'John' was one of several members of one family abused by Fr Brendan Smyth. He tells GERRY MORIARTY, Northern Editor, about his damaged life and his anger at the Church that failed to stop Smyth
IT’S LATE ON Thursday night and we are sitting in a little restaurant on the western seaboard. John (not his real name) is elaborating on how, as a teenager he was abused by Fr Brendan Smyth, how his older brother was abused before him, his sister after him, and his four first cousins later still.
John is a wiry 52-year-old man, pulsing with energy. In this lovely but recession-hit village, he has thrown himself into community work. He’s well got. It’s late but at his request the local restaurant cheerfully provides a 10oz steak and chips for a hungry Irish Times reporter. He’s happy here in this beautiful place beside the Atlantic.
Yet John is battling with old inner demons to ensure all this latest publicity doesn’t plunge him back into a trough of despair. But he feels he has a duty to talk. It’s time for the Cardinal to quit, he is sure.
Had the former abbot of Smyth’s Norbertine order, Fr Kevin Smith, or the late bishop of Kilmore, Francis McKiernan, acted properly, John and his extended family would have been spared much of the torture they experienced. Had the current Catholic primate, Cardinal Seán Brady, gone out of his way in 1975 to inform John’s parents about the abuse, Smyth might have been stopped many years before he was finally jailed.
“Let us move on, but Cardinal Brady is not letting us move on,” says John. “What the Church needs to do is clear out the top. It’s like having an old state, and all the old people are there, and people are trying to find this new form of democracy and freedom. You can’t do that until you clear out the dead wood. Give us your Brian D’Arcys any day, your loving, passionate priests. They have to get rid of the people who represent the past, the people who think only of protecting the institution,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the Church. I still have a belief in God. It’s the messenger that bothers me.”
Smyth insinuated his way into his family through friendship with John’s parents and aunt and through using the family’s address in west Belfast to pick up Northern post. It started years of abuse.
This week, BBC screened a documentary that reporter Darragh McIntyre and producer Alison Millar made about Cardinal Brady, and about Smyth and the damage that he did, and is still doing after his death.
In one scene John, described as the west Belfast boy, and Brendan Boland meet, for the first time since 1975, close to the promenade at Holywood, Co Down, just outside Belfast. We see the initial healthy intimacies of two people who have endured and are still enduring the ordeal of child sexual abuse.
SMYTH MOLESTED the two of them when they were young teenagers in a Dublin guesthouse after a Wombles concert in late 1974. First Boland, then John. That was when Boland resolved to shop Smyth to the clerical authorities and stop his activities, or so he thought and hoped.
“I thought I had saved you,” says Boland to John, whose face is shielded from the camera.
It’s curious but both of them have media connections. Boland helps run the presses for Rupert Murdoch’s beleaguered empire in London; John worked in the film-making business in London.
There was nothing stage-managed about that take in the documentary, says John. “What you saw is exactly what you got, it was totally genuine. It was a shot that couldn’t be done twice. After so many years it was very emotional.”
John is happy to tell his story, but has good reason to remain anonymous. He, his older brother and their cousins are dealing with this latest reactivation of the abuse scandal in different ways, as best they can. There is no need to make it worse by bringing the extended family into the public equation.
“I have been deprived of a childhood, deprived of a life, deprived of relationships in many ways and deprived of my religion,” he says.
The nub of the latest convulsions over clerical abuse is simple. Why were the children’s parents not told of the abuse after the three-member canonical inquiry team, of which the then Fr John Brady was a member, had established the veracity of the allegations? That would have spared people abuse. Where does the buck stop? With someone else; the former head of the Norbertines, Smyth’s old order, Cardinal Brady protested this week.
It doesn’t wash with John. “I don’t think they have really grasped the thing about abuse, that it is a crime against humanity . . . the Church just can’t seem to understand the seriousness of it all, regardless of the protections they have put in place.”
John featured, again anonymously, in Chris Moore’s 1994 UTV documentary, Suffer Little Children, which exposed Smyth in all his hideousness.
When Boland saw that programme it reawakened a suspicion that maybe the poison he thought he had cleared in 1975, when he spoke to the inquiry team, was still in the system. But he didn’t make the Wombles concert connection until McIntyre and Millar started working on their story earlier this year.
John wonders about Smyth, and how he could perpetrate evil for 40 years in Ireland, the US and possibly in Italy and Wales too. Why did his superiors not bring him to book? John has a succinct line for Smyth’s poisonous legacy. “He split up Church and State and brought down [the Fianna Fáil/Labour government in 1994], all in one breath.”
Indeed, it took John, his brother and their cousins to nail him. That was in 1991 when Smyth was arrested and released on bail in the North. It wasn’t until 1994 that he finally ended up in prison after going on the run, spending much of that time safely holed up at Kilnacrott Abbey in Co Cavan. He was jailed for a second time in the South, but died in 1997 a short time into that sentence.
Why didn’t his order and his Church stop Smyth? “I’ve often thought he must have had some hold on some of these people. How else could a man be able to cause such damage between here and the US?”
John has had two marriages and a number of failed relationships. He has no children. He is now in a relationship that is calm and stable. He takes time to apologise to the women he has hurt over the years. “I’ve put other people through hell. And I apologise to them because it’s only now I’m thinking that it was all about me, me, me, in a way. It’s the damage I’ve created around me. This is the tsunami, this is the knock-on effect of all this.”
He wants Cardinal Brady to go so that he can have a new start, and the Church can have a new start too. “Clear out the dead wood,” he repeats.
As he poses for a picture it is clear he is emotionally sore, and tired of the constant resurrection of a terrible story. But he’s strong enough to push on with life. “I just really hope that this can be the end to it. I don’t want to be sitting here in 20 years with a Zimmerframe, telling you the same thing.”
