Victim and garda who acted to have abuser removed see justice at last.FR THOMAS Naughton didn’t look like a man with the power to ruin a child’s life as he shuffled into court yesterday.
The frail 78-year-old priest leaned on his walking stick as he approached Bray courthouse, and his ill-fitting trousers flapped pitifully about his ankles.
He appeared to shrink visibly when he was met with a barrage of cameras at the entrance. “Do you feel any sense of guilt? Do you feel any sense of shame?” a reporter barked at him and he cowed away.
But in 1982, he was “a big man” to his six-year-old victim, who was then an altar boy. He estimated that Naughton had sexually assaulted him up to 70 times over a two-year period.
He was intimidated by the priest, who told him he would get in trouble if he told anyone about the abuse. Judge Michael O’Shea described the abuse as “absolutely catastrophic” to the boy’s life.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be normal,” the victim said plaintively in a statement read out by prosecuting barrister Paul Murray.
Naughton bowed his head low when the victim impact statement was read out. After the abuse started, the victim went into himself and avoided talking about it to anyone. “I was afraid of getting close to people,” he said. Any relationships he formed never lasted long.
He had issues with intimacy and said he could never imagine settling down in a normal relationship with a girl. He was sexually confused and was receiving treatment for sexual addiction. “I didn’t know what way I was supposed to be.”
He became extremely paranoid and attempted suicide in 1999 and 2001. He made a breakthrough in 2006 when he began seeing a psychiatrist who diagnosed post traumatic stress disorder and depression. However, he has been unable to hold down a full-time job since August 2006 and currently lives on disability benefit.
The victim, accompanied by supporters, slipped into court quietly as the case began and left quickly afterwards without commenting on the outcome.
But the imprisonment of Naughton was welcomed by retired detective sergeant John Brennan, who had come to see justice being served. A resident of Valleymount, Co Wicklow, he had taken action to have Naughton removed after parents complained about him.
“I think it’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s the wrong word really, I suppose – but that justice is seen to be done at this late stage after 25 years, a quarter of a century; that a man can be brought here and that justice can be seen to be done after that length of time.”
His own family had suffered after the priest was removed from the parish.
“We were ostracised out of everything really, anything to do with the church. I was chairman of the senior citizens’ committee. I was secretary of the development of the hall. I was on the school board of management. I was very much involved. Suddenly I found that . . . we were being maligned.”
The family received anonymous letters and excrement was posted through their letter box, but he didn’t believe parishioners were behind these incidents.
“What’s not widely known is that there were other paedophiles in west Wicklow at the time. There was the Fr [Noel] Reynolds in Glendalough and Fr Frank McCarthy in Dunlavin,” he said.
“I took some of the letters to a handwriting expert and they said they were written by an educated hand, though disguised to look like it wasn’t an educated hand. I was pretty sure they were coming from other clergy in the area rather than the locals.”
Mr Brennan is now calling for a criminal investigation into the way Naughton’s superiors moved him around, despite their knowledge of the abuse.
“If there is neglect and evidence of a cover-up it shouldn’t be a question of somebody resigning. They should be subject of a criminal charge,” he said.
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FR THOMAS Naughton, who was previously convicted of indecent assault in 1998, has been jailed for two years for indecently assaulting an altar boy in Valleymount, Co Wicklow, in the early 1980s.
The 78-year-old St Patrick’s Missionary Society priest pleaded guilty to five sample counts of indecent assault and yesterday he received five three-year sentences, to run concurrently, with the final year suspended in each case.
Handing down the sentences at Wicklow Circuit Court in Bray, Judge Michael O’Shea said the abuse was “appalling, shocking and horrifying”.
The court heard that the abuse started in 1982, when the victim was six years old. After he had made his First Communion he became an altar server in Valleymount parish, where Naughton was curate.
The boy cycled to the daily 8.30am Mass and left his bike at the church, as it was beside the school. The abuse started within weeks, when Naughton put his hands into the boy’s trousers and made the boy put his hands down his trousers.
The abuse happened before and after Mass. When the victim reported the abuse to gardaí in 2007, he said he remembered crying when the priest abused him “but he wouldn’t stop”.
Naughton would wait for the boy to collect his bicycle after school and continue the abuse.
“I was afraid of my life of Naughton, who was a big man,” the victim said. He said the priest told him that he would get into trouble if he told anyone.
The court heard the abuse continued for two years and the victim estimated he had been sexually assaulted “close to 70 times”.
After the boy’s friends told his parents that the priest was “very fond” of him, his parents grew alarmed and his father went to the parish priest. On feeling that he was making no progress, he told the parish priest he was giving him three weeks to get rid of Naughton. At about the same time the now-retired Det Sgt John Brennan also raised concerns about the priest, and Naughton was transferred to Donnycarney.
Barrister Paul Murray, for the Director of Public Prosecutions, said Naughton had told gardaí he didn’t remember specific incidents of abuse, but it was likely that they had happened. He said he could not put a name or a face on anyone he may have abused. “I accept that he’s being honest,” Naughton said of the victim’s complaint, “but I can’t identify him.”
The court heard that he had been convicted of indecently assaulting altar boys in Dublin in 1998 and had received a three-year sentence, later reduced by six months.
Since his release, he had been living under a very strict regime of supervision at his order’s home in Kiltegan, his barrister Orla Crowe said. He cannot say Mass or wear clerical garb.
Ms Crowe said Naughton wanted to offer his profound apology to the injured party “in respect of the very grave wrongdoing that he engaged in”.
She asked the judge to take into account his guilty plea, his willingness to have treatment, his co-operation with gardaí and his failing health. He had a number of medical conditions, including early Parkinson’s disease, osteoporosis and hypertension.
She also said the priest was subjected to an “unprecedented level of public interest” in the wake of the Murphy report.
Naughton was one of 46 priests investigated by the commission which looked at how the Dublin archdiocese handled child sex abuse complaints.
Judge O’Shea said the publicity was in many ways “brought upon himself by himself”.
He said the boy was extremely vulnerable, and the priest had abused his position of trust and respect. By waiting for the boy after school, he was “plotting, indeed stalking in respect of ”. The abuse had had an “absolutely catastrophic” impact on the victim’s life, in terms of suicide attempts, anxiety, sleeplessness and weight loss.
Judge O’Shea said the strict monitoring regime by Naughton’s superiors at Kiltegan should continue after his release. Ms Crowe said the sentence would be appealed.
The victim attended the hearing but did not speak to the media.
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HAD BISHOP Donal Murray acted on complaints against Fr Thomas Naughton in 1983, Mervyn Rundle and others would have been spared the horrific abuse inflicted on them by the priest in later years.
Yesterday, Mr Rundle, who has great reason to be bitter but insists he is not, wondered “when are the guards going to start proceedings against these guys ”.
It’s just that “these guys” have “done wrong”, he said. He could not understand how they could still be bishops.
Had Bishop Murray acted appropriately when approached by parents in Valleymount with complaints about Naughton, Mervyn Rundle’s life would have been very different, and two other young men might still be alive. All were abused as boys by Naughton in Donnycarney – where he was moved to from Valleymount in 1984. Following further complaints there, Naughton was moved to Ringsend parish in 1986, where he continued to abuse.
The Murphy report is very clear on where responsibility lies for much of this. It said of Bishop Murray: “he did not deal properly with the suspicions and concerns that were expressed to him in relation to Fr Naughton (at Valleymount). When, a short time later, factual evidence of Fr Naughton’s abusing emerged in another parish (Donnycarney) Bishop Murray’s failure to reinvestigate the earlier suspicions (in Valleymount) was inexcusable.”
The report also found that this inaction by Bishop Murray and other authorities in the archdiocese meant “Fr Naughton was allowed to continue his abusive behaviour for several years, thereby damaging more victims”.
Such was the severity of the abuse in Mervyn Rundle’s case that he was awarded what is believed to be the largest ever settlement paid out by the Dublin archdiocese. It was significantly over €300,000, plus costs.
Another man – “Dave” (not his real name) – also settled with the archdiocese. Mervyn Rundle knew Dave. He recalled that two days after Naughton pleaded guilty to abusing Dave in Donnycarney, Dave took his own life. He wasn’t the only one. Mervyn recalled another man, also abused in the parish as a boy by Naughton, who took his own life before charges were brought in his case.
Speaking to this reporter at the Four Courts in Dublin on January 28th, 2003, just after he had reached his record settlement, Mervyn Rundle had a simple ambition. Then 28, he just wanted “to live my life and be normal like everyone else”. It had taken him 18 years to get to that point, he said then. Speaking yesterday, almost seven years later, he appears to have succeeded.
It has been a long haul.
He was nine and an altar boy when the abuse began in 1985. It was shortly after Naughton came to Donnycarney parish. The abuse continued through 1986. In 1998 Naughton received a three-year jail sentence for this abuse of Mervyn Rundle. That was reduced to 2½ years, on appeal.
The conviction followed a Garda investigation which began in 1995 when the Rundle family first reported the abuse to civil authorities. The family had first reported it to church authorities in Dublin in 1985, 10 years earlier.
Speaking at the Four Courts that January day in 2003, Rose Rundle, Mervyn’s mother, remembered how in 1985, “Mervyn came home and said, ‘that priest’s a queer’.” She continued: “I said, ‘what do ya mean?’ He said, ‘look at me’. All his clothes were messed up.” She contacted a family friend.
Her husband Mervyn snr, Mervyn jnr, and the friend went to see Mgr Alex Stenson, then chancellor of the archdiocese. Mgr Stenson asked to speak to Mervyn jnr alone. “He told me I was lying and said I better tell the truth very quickly,” Mervyn jnr recalled. He remembered the monsignor said: “ ‘Stop your lies, stop telling your lies’ . . . It was really fierce, really savage. I was terrified. But I said, ‘I’m not telling lies’. And I wasn’t.”
It emerged later that other Donnycarney parents had also complained to the church authorities about Naughton. They contacted Naughton. He admitted the abuse and was sent for treatment. Four months later he was back in parish work at Ringsend. There he resumed his abuse, targeting two altar boys in particular. After two years, and further complaints, he was removed from active parish work.
Despite all of this, the Rundle family were put through the wringer by Archbishop’s House.
It was why Mervyn Rundle was so happy that day – January 28th, 2003. “That’s what today means. It means that, finally, they have to admit that I was never telling lies, that all I ever told was the truth, just me, a 10-year-old child against all those big priests.
“This took seven years out of my life, and that’s just this one court case. They fought us every inch of the way. They started by telling us they’d give €75,000; take it or leave it.
“But I was determined. I mean, my life was in bits. Would you take €75,000 for that? No way. So we kept on fighting. We knew it was important to get the documents, because of all the meetings my father had had with them back when I was a child. And when my solicitor got them, there it was in black and white – they knew all about the priest, they knew that he was at children before he ever came near Donnycarney and me.
“And even then they still fought us, even though they had known this all along. It’s beyond belief, really, what they’re prepared to do. They made me go though seven years of fighting to get to this point. They could have saved me all that.
“One of the things that really hurts me is what they did to my parents. Both of them were very active in the parish. It was my father’s proudest day when he was made a Minister of the Eucharist. And then all this happened, and when my father went and told them at the archbishop’s palace about me being abused by Naughton, everything changed.
“My parents were shut out in the cold by the priests in the parish. They didn’t want to know my parents anymore; they cut them dead. That was just vicious.”
In 1995, Mervyn Rundle and his parents met Cardinal Connell about the abuse. He was very apologetic. But later, when the Rundles heard Naughton was still saying Mass publicly, they went to the gardaí.
Cardinal Connell did not inform gardaí that Naughton had admitted 10 years previously to abusing Mervyn. Mrs Rundle remembered how Mervyn “just cried and cried” after that meeting with Cardinal Connell.
Mervyn, then 19, had become aware that other boys had been abused since he first reported the abuse to church authorities in 1985.
“He cried so much because he felt guilty about the abuse of the others.”
After the settlement was announced, Cardinal Connell issued a statement expressing profound regret. He sincerely apologised, acknowledged that the abuse of Mervyn Rundle had occurred, and acknowledged that before he had been abused in 1985 “reasons for concern about the conduct of Fr Naughton had emerged which, had they been more successfully pursued, could have resulted in his withdrawal from parochial duties”.
There were five meetings with the archdiocese before the settlement and apology were agreed. Still, he was delighted.
“I am delighted the Catholic Church has at last acknowledged the pain it caused a frightened young boy for so long,” he said.
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