At Cork Circuit Criminal Court yesterday Fr Vincent Mercer, 66, who is out of ministry but remains a member of the Dominican Order, told his victim he was sorry.
Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin said: “This was a most serious breach of trust, given Mercer’s occupation at the time and the difference of age, he being an adult and the boy being 11 at the time — a significant age gap. Mr Mercer was a family friend. He had been received into the family as a friend; there was a significant breach of trust.”
Garda Caroline Keogh said the victim’s parents had trusted Mercer as a friend to the extent that he was a weekly visitor at their home.
The abuse developed from fondling the boy’s genitals outside his clothing, to inside his clothing, masturbation and oral sex. Then a priest at St Mary’s on Pope’s Quay, Cork, Mercer brought the boy to prayer groups and similar gatherings, sexually assaulting him in the car on the way to and from these meetings. At a number of overnights at religious centres, further abuse occurred, from the time he was 11 to when he was 17.
The victim said: “At the tender age of 11 my life changed. I was robbed of my childhood. I was abused by a very close family friend, Fr Vincent Mercer.”
The victim described the different stages he went through, initially thinking the abuse was somehow normal and later, as the abuse continued, realising it was not normal but feeling too embarrassed to say anything about it and that he might have been partly responsible. He felt terrified that if he told of what was happening to him Mercer might intervene and claim that it was not the truth.
However, the support of his family enabled the victim to go to gardaí in May 2012 and make a complaint. Concluding his victim impact statement, he said: “I stand here in front of you to ask you for one thing — justice — for what Fr Mercer imposed on me and my family over the last 27 years.”
Mercer got into the witness box and turned to the victim and members of his family, addressing many of them by their Christian names in his public apology.
“I want to apologise unreservedly to you for the terrible hurt and abuse and trauma that I caused you and I want to unreservedly apologise to you [the victim] and to your wife for the strain it has been on you and the harm to your relationship,” he said. Defence senior counsel Tom Creed said Mercer effectively pleaded guilty to all 39 counts when he pleaded to the sample counts of indecent assault/sexual assault between Jan 1, 1986, and Feb 22, 1994.
Mercer got a suspended jail sentence in 2005 for sexually assaulting boys in the 1970s as a teacher at Newbridge College.