BOOK OF THE DAY: JOHN WATTERSONreviews Deep Deception: Ireland's Swimming ScandalsBy Justine McCarthy The O'Brien Press pp 256. €12.99
IN THE promotional blurb for Justine McCarthy’s meticulously researched book on Ireland’s swimming scandals it states the sport was shattered when the systematic abuses of child swimmers became public.
One of the strongly made points repeated by the author is that swimming should have woken up to the situation a decade before. Heads in the sand does not adequately describe how the sport deserted its most vulnerable, even in the face of accusations from some of its most venerable members.
Outrageous as it may sound, the last people to feel shattered in this pitiful tale of weak administrators, amoral coaches and negligent officials were those who ran the sport and allowed sexual predators like George Gibney and Derry O’Rourke easy access to children, even after the two were being investigated by the gardaí as paedophiles.
The book records in detail, and with first-hand accounts from victims, a series of sexual assaults against children heaped upon a succession of others in what is the most damaging scandal to have hit Irish sport. It’s a story of Gibney, O’Rourke and Frank McCann – two Olympic swimming coaches and one deranged and ultimately murderous swimming president: administrator McCann, who burned to death his wife and foster-daughter because he did not want his wife to find out from the Irish adoption agency that he had fathered a baby by a teenage girl; Olympic coach Gibney who raped boys and girls, escaped prison on a technicality and skipped the country to Scotland, then to the US; O’Rourke, who succeeded Gibney as Olympic coach and served just nine years in Portlaoise prison for 149 charges of raping girls from 10 years of age upwards.
The author goes into great detail on each of the three men as well as their relationships with each other, because to do so is to understand how murky the waters had become in Irish swimming from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, and how closely connected the three were. She asks whether a paedophile ring was in operation, and questions why Gibney was not pursued following his successful judicial review when fresh allegations were made against him by a female swimmer in the 1990s.
Some tracts illustrate the confusion, naivety and deception that appeared to be the norm in the sport at the time. At one point O’Rourke was chosen by the Leinster branch as a go-between to seek an apology from Gibney for the O’Toole family ; Gibney had unsuccessfully tried to climb into bed with European champion swimmer Gary O’Toole on an away trip and conducted a campaign of lies about him in the media. At the same time, a victim, Chalky White, chose to confide in a swimming administrator about how Gibney had sexually abused him on a swimming trip – so he rang McCann for advice.
If there is an upside, it is the doggedness and selflessness with which some people in swimming went to help victims and expose perpetrators. Gary, Aidan and Kay O’Toole, Carole Walsh, Bart Nolan snr, and victims who were prepared to be named in court to highlight the abuse, all soar in the text.
This is a story that needed to be written. All the victims have ever asked for is justice and for people to know what happened. Now, thanks to Justine McCarthy, they do.
Johnny Watterson is a sports writer with The Irish Times.He has worked across many areas including the swimming scandals involving Olympic coaches George Gibney and Derry O'Rourke