.jpg)
Liam Coughlan (90), a former teacher and principal of the primary school on Patrick Street, Portarlington, Co Offaly, was found guilty earlier this month to 31 counts of indecent assault on nine former pupils in the 1980s.
Coughlan created a “false, distorted and evil reality” in the school, the president of the Circuit Court, Judge Keenan Johnson, said after noting evidence that Coughlan would bring boys to the front of his class on an almost daily basis and sexually interfere with them while continuing to address the classroom.
He commended the victims who had come forward to the gardaí and said their victim impact statements were a “powerful insight” into the lifelong damage done to people who suffer childhood sexual abuse.
The trial heard the abuse happened mostly in the classroom but also elsewhere inside and outside the school, that the boys were mostly aged between 11 and 13 years at the time, and that many of the boys in the classes taught by Coughlan during the period concerned were subjected to abuse.
“Almost a whole generation of all Catholic boys from Portarlington went through this,” one of the victims said in a victim impact statement to the Circuit Criminal Court in Portlaoise on Friday.
“Br Coughlan poisoned a whole town’s young male population,” the man said.
“You could see the evidence on nights out in the town years later with the levels of violence and aggression in pubs and on the streets,” he said.
The man said he had been doing well socially, academically, and in sport up to the age of ten, but after he was abused by Coughlan he became introverted and fearful.
Coughlan, he said, had taken the potential of a “beautiful, young and good kid” and “ripped it to shreds”.
Evidence of the effect of Coughlan’s crimes, he said, could be seen “in the number of suicides by former students of Br Coughlan.”
In their victim impact statements, the men outlined how they had suffered insecurity, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and difficulties with personal relationships, in the decades since the abuse.
One man, reading his statement from the witness box while Coughlan, who is receiving palliative care in Mountjoy Prison, listened by way of video-link, said he would never know what his life would have been like if the abuse had not occurred.
“I fear public embarrassment and being shamed in public,” the man said. “I often have the feeling that I have done something wrong when I haven’t.”
Coughlan had “acted with impunity for so long”, the man said. “Did the various authorities have no inkling that this was happening?”
The shame associated with what had happened to him, he said, rests with Coughlan, the Christian Brothers, the Catholic Church and the Department of Education “whose oversight and inspection processes failed me by leaving this perpetrator in situ in charge of children for decades.”
Coughlan was jailed in 2023 for indecently assaulting 24 former pupils at the CBS primary school on Stephen Street, Kilkenny, during the 1970s, and was due to be released in February 2027. His new sentence starts from Friday.
Barrister Maurice Coffey, instructed by Vallely Legal, told the judge his client now accepted the jury’s verdict and, at this “very late stage in the day”, wanted to apologise.
During the trial, Det Elaine Conlon told the prosecuting counsel William Fennelly that, when interviewed, Coughlan denied the charges and said the complainants were “all liars”.
She said some former Portarlington pupils did not want to make statements saying they had “put that behind them”.
In his judgment, Keenan referred to the obstructive legal strategy currently being adopted by the Christian Brothers in the civil courts in cases where victims of childhood sexual abuse are seeking damages. A number of the cases involve damages being sought arising from abuse by Coughlan.
The “morally bankrupt and totally unfair” approach being taken, he said, appeared to be designed the congregation’s assets. However, he said, he was not taking this into consideration when sentencing Coughlan.