EVIDENCE FROM VICTIMS:ONE OF the complainants against Ger Doyle told the court he was just 10 or 11 years old when the coach abused him.
The complainant said he was a recreational swimmer in the pool in New Ross, Co Wexford, where Doyle was working.
He told the jury that one day, in 1984 or 1985, he was messing with his brother and friends in the changing room when Doyle came in and told him he was in trouble.
The witness said he was brought into the manager’s office and the door was locked.
The defendant threatened to call the Garda or the boy’s parents.
The witness said he was wearing only his swimming togs at the time.
The court heard the defendant had his hands in his pants while sitting behind his desk.
The defendant said he would not call the Garda if he could give the witness a few slaps on the bottom.
“I was absolutely petrified. I was rooted to the spot with terror,” the complainant told Roderick O’Hanlon SC, prosecuting.
“He came out from where he was sitting and said he would have to take my togs off because I would get pneumonia,” he said.
The court then heard Doyle put his hands inside the complainant’s togs and fondled him.
The swimming togs eventually came off and the defendant was pressing himself against the boy from behind. “I then got my voice back and said I would scream if he didn’t stop,” the witness told the court.
Cross-examining, Doyle’s barrister John O’Kelly, SC said the door of the manager’s office could only be locked from the outside. The complainant replied: “He put a key in the door and locked it.”
Mr O’Kelly also cited an incident when the witness put an aerosol can into a bonfire and the defendant had caught him and called the police, asking if this was the reason the complaints were made.
“This is not about revenge,” the witness replied.
Another complainant told the court he had been caught stealing money from the pockets of people’s clothes in the changing room at the pool in 1987 or 1988.
He was brought into the manager’s office by Doyle and then taken downstairs to the boiler room.
There the complainant had his pants pulled down and bottom smacked forcefully by the defendant.
Mr O’Kelly pointed out that, in his statement to the Garda, the complainant mentioned black gates leading to the boiler room which had never had been there.
In response the witness said: “That yoke there [Doyle] brought me in. How can you remember when someone is abusing you? You only remember the things that happened to you not the things that are in front of you.”
Mr O’Kelly also put it to the complainant that he had jumped on the “bandwagon” in 2005 and had discussed what he was going to say with the other witnesses.
The witness replied: “I have carried this burden for 20 years, boy. Why would a man make up this? I am not sick like he is sick.”