The former Christian Brother Liam Coughlan, who was sentenced this week for indecently assaulting 19 boys in a primary school in Kilkenny in the 1970s, is the subject of an ongoing investigation into similar crimes in Co Laois where he taught in the 1980s and 1990s.
A number of former pupils of a CBS national school in Laois said Coughlan (87), who was school principal, would select a boy, bring him to the top of the class, sit him on his lap, and kiss and fondle him in full view of others during classes.
“It was a daily occurrence,” said one man, now in his 50s who made a statement to An Garda Síochána last year.
He was kissing me on the cheek and trying to put his hands down my trousers. We didn’t know about sex. I didn’t know what paedophilia was. Later I realised this was all wrong
— A former Laois student of Liam Coughlan
He claimed about half the boys in his class were abused in this way when Coughlan was their teacher and that given that he taught in the school for about 15 years, very many boys in the Laois town were likely to have suffered.
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When he met the investigating garda, the man said, he brought along a Confirmation photograph of his class and pointed out and named the boys he knew had been abused.
“He was kissing me on the cheek and trying to put his hands down my trousers,” the man said. “We didn’t know about sex. I didn’t know what paedophilia was. Later I realised this it was all wrong.”
One family in the Co Laois town had four boys abused by Coughlan when they were attending the school, a member of the family told The Irish Times.
The 19 sample cases from Kilkenny that led to Coughlan being sentenced this week in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court involved kissing boys, touching their bottoms, fondling their genitals, and Coughlan making boys touch his penis and masturbate him, with the abuse happening during class.
Coughlan pleaded guilty to the crimes. In a separate trial earlier this year he contested 30 counts involving five other boys, also at CBS boys school Kilkenny, but was found guilty by a jury and given a sentence of three years and two months.
Judge Elma Sheahan said the Kilkenny abuse not only ‘instilled fear and embarrassment in the lives and minds of young boys attending school but has served to torment the men these young boys have become’
This week’s ruling means Coughlan, who has cancer and other serious health issues, is now beginning a 4½-year sentence. He was investigated in 1998 when three of the men he abused in Kilkenny made complaints, but charges were not brought on that occasion.
Judge Elma Sheahan said the Kilkenny abuse not only “instilled fear and embarrassment in the lives and minds of young boys attending school but has served to torment the men these young boys have become”.
It has also had an intergenerational effect, she said.
Another former student of the Co Laois school who has made a statement to the gardaí said that Coughlan had him sit on his lap in the front of the class while he rubbed his face against him and tried to kiss him.
What had happened to him was at the lower end of the scale and he used to think it had not affected him, he said.
“Then last year when I heard [on the news] he had been charged, I came into my wife and said, they got the f***er, and I burst into tears, which I wasn’t expecting. I was holding it in all these years.”
The man said he once saw Coughlan alone in a classroom in the boys’ school with two young girls in school uniforms.
The mother of a boy who was taught by Coughlan said her son became so distressed that she brought him to a clinical psychologist. This was around 1991, she said.
After seeing her son a number of times, the psychologist told her Coughlan had physically and psychologically abused the boy and that it was likely he had also sexually abused him. The psychologist reported Coughlan to the departments of Justice, Education and Health, the mother said.
“Next thing [Coughlan] announced to the school that he was giving up teaching and was going to Bristol to train for a new career,” she said.
Recently, when in a Co Laois pub after a funeral, some men who were slightly ahead of her son in school came over to her and said ‘we all knew about what happened to [her son]. It happened to all of us too’, she said.
Her son now has a severe mental health problem which she says was “triggered” by the abuse he received from Coughlan.
The woman has made a statement to the gardaí but her son has not yet done so. Her son’s case may be important because it is likely there are records from the time Coughlan was reported by the clinical psychologist, she said.
Recently, when in a Co Laois pub after a funeral, some men who were slightly ahead of her son in school came over to her and said “we all knew about what happened to [her son]. It happened to all of us too”, she said.
At the time her son was in primary school, she said. The Co Laois town where Coughlan taught had a small population: “It was more or less a one-horse town – very Catholic, and not in the best sense.”
After Coughlan gave up teaching and left the Christian Brothers, he married. In more recent years, Coughlan has been living in Tramore, Co Waterford.
“The good people of [the Co Laois town] must have known what was going on and just looked the other way,” said one of the men who has made a statement to gardaí.
“It was happening in full view: kissing us, touching us on the arse. That’s what makes me so angry.”
Maeve Lewis, chief executive of One in Four, a support service for people who have suffered sex abuse as children, said that criminal convictions can help them deal with their trauma.
“One of the absolutely necessary pathways to recovery is public acknowledgment of the harm that has been caused and, in some ways, that is the whole purpose of a criminal trial, isn’t it?” she said.
