A SECONDARY school teacher has denied before the High Court she was “infatuated” with and had made sexual advances to a male colleague whom she alleges sexually harassed and bullied her.
Mary O’Toole, a teacher at Tullamore College between 1993 and 2001, yesterday rejected suggestions she had found fellow teacher Jim Mooney “alluring or attractive” and had made advances towards him which were rejected.
Under cross-examination by Colm Smyth SC, for Co Offaly Vocational Education Committee, she denied she had tried to initiate oral sex with Mr Mooney on one occasion at his house, and that he had spurned her advances.
Ms O’Toole had previously told the court Mr Mooney had exposed himself to her and tried to get her to perform oral sex, and she denied Mr Smyth’s suggestion that what had happened was the other way around. Mr Mooney’s version of events was “not true”, she said.
While she had informed another teacher and the school’s Teachers’ Union of Ireland representative about that incident, she did not make a complaint to the Garda that she was sexually assaulted because Mr Mooney was drunk at the time, she said.
She compared Mr Mooney’s denials of her claims of sexual harassment to former US president Bill Clinton’s statement that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” when rumours of the Monica Lewinsky affair emerged.
In proceedings against Co Offaly VEC, Ms O’Toole (48), a married mother of one, Whitehall Estate, Tullamore, alleges that while employed with the VEC at Tullamore College, she was leered at, inappropriately touched and intimidated by Mr Mooney on occasions between 1996 and 2000. She transferred to another school in 2001.
The VEC has denied the claims.
Yesterday, the fourth day of the action, Ms O’Toole rejected claims she had told another teacher, Michelle Brooks, that she liked Mr Mooney’s personality and his accent.
She never said to Ms Brooks she would like “to ride off into the sunset” with Mr Mooney, she said.
While she had cut out a picture of Mr Mooney dressed as a nun which appeared in a local newspaper, she did so to show it to a counsellor she was attending, she said.
Ms O’Toole also said she had stuck a meat skewer in a tyre of Mr Mooney’s car and damaged his car aerial in October 1998 to “get back at him” after he had been rude to her in front of colleagues.
She denied counsel’s suggestion that Mr Mooney had never said, at a party at her home, that all women are stupid, and had called both her and her mother stupid.
She denied a suggestion that a letter written by her to Mr Mooney, in which she asked six times to meet with him, was more like a letter written by a love-struck teenager than by a professional.
That letter was written the day after she called to Mr Mooney’s home, which was 300 yards from hers, in the early hours of the morning after she was out drinking, she said. The purpose of the letter was to speak to him about his treatment of her and to sort it out, she said.
All she wanted was to be friends with Mr Mooney and to have him respect her, she said.
The case continues before Mr Justice Iarfhlaith O’Neill.
