Profile of an abuser: Christian Brother Martin O'Flaherty

RTÉ News​

01-05-2025

As a senior Christian Brother, Martin O'Flaherty could access all areas in Irish education.
His mark is evident across the sector, not just in his primary and secondary teaching and principal posts, but in teacher training, governorships and Boards of Management, on schools' syllabus, in the creation of the Christian Brothers' schools trust, ERST, and in the sell-off of educational land.
He was part of the Christian Brothers' core leadership for a dozen years from 2002 to 2014, and he had an influential reach on either side of those years.
O'Flaherty was a keeper of the keys to the congregation's assets and secrets. He was one of them himself; he is currently in Mountjoy jail, his status in the Christian Brothers' leadership exclusively revealed by RTÉ Investigates.
A native of Doora, Ennis, Co Clare, O'Flaherty was reared in St Michael's Villas in the town. He returned in June 2015 for the launch of a local history book about St Michael's and preached the homily at a special mass in Ennis cathedral.
O'Flaherty was a typical Christian Brother recruit: by his own account, the son of parents of modest means, who were delighted to be among the first to benefit from social housing schemes of the 1950s.
"Imagine how lucky they must have felt in the knowledge that there was a green area 'out front', as we used to say, where children could play and be supervised", the Clare Champion reported him preaching at the mass.
His parents were probably delighted too when their son entered the Christian Brothers' training school at Carriglea Park, Dún Laoghaire, in 1965, at the age of 13, to study there.
The former journalist and senator John Whelan was another Christian Brother recruit, from Co Kildare. He joined Carriglea eight years later, in 1973, aged 12.
John Whelan brought his toy soldiers with him and hid them under the bed. Four years later, in fifth year, his parents drove up to collect him and he left, completing his Leaving Cert elsewhere.
He is critical of wholesale denunciation of the Brothers that ignores the good, inspiring educators among them, and he was aware corporal punishment wasn't just legal back then; it was encouraged.
But Carriglea was different. He described a training school for Brothers that was a breeding ground for violence.
What he experienced and witnessed, he said, was a school of "cruel behaviour", in which "a handful of men seemed to take pleasure in a sort of vicious application of being able to beat you."
He recalled one incident that exemplified the culture; for him, it was the last straw. It happened at a football match.
"We would have been fifth and 6th years, versus the teachers, the Brothers, and one chap was running rings around them, then scored a goal", said John Whelan, "and on his way back out, celebrating, he got bursted, like, levelled".
The Brother who beat the boy had to be restrained; he was the Brother Superior of the school, its principal.
"When the Brother Superior was dishing it out, you know, it was very much embedded in the system", said Mr Whelan.
"Corporal punishment was taken out of place and amplified to a place of cruelty and brutality. Boys were hurt, and terrified — but you know, it wasn't just one bad egg, it wasn't just a rogue trader; it was more systemic."
In the face of that culture hung the fate of sexual abuser, Br Martin O'Flaherty. He was a brutal physical abuser too, described as "a monster" by one of his victims.
Yet for 50 years he remained undetected and untroubled within the Christian Brothers' congregation. Instead, he rose to the top.
The Scoping Inquiry that reported last year was focused solely on historical child sexual abuse in schools, not physical abuse. Yet on sexual abuse too, the Christian Brothers came out on top, with the highest number of alleged abusers, albeit having had the largest number of schools.
Using the Christian Brothers' own figures, the Scoping report cited 820 allegations of historical child sexual abuse across 132 schools against 255 Christian Brothers, mainly from the 1960s up to the early 1990s. Total allegations are likely to exceed the figures given to it by the religious orders, it reported.
From O'Flaherty's tenure in one Kilkenny primary school there is an indication is just how high the figures are likely to go.
O'Flaherty started teaching in CBS Primary School, 'Scoil Iognaid de Ris' in Stephen Street, Kilkenny from August 1976 until August 1981. There he sexually abused several boys.
He shared some of that time with another child-abusing teacher, then-serving Brother Liam Coughlan. In May 2023, former Br Coughlan (88) was convicted of indecent assault on five boys at the school in the 1970s; in October 2023 he pleaded guilty in relation to the abuse of 19 more boys.
Br Martin O'Flaherty, arrested in October 2020, pleaded not guilty each time. He put his victims through six separate trials, from 2022 up to last month, his legal defence paid by the Christian Brothers.
The Scoping Inquiry reported four alleged abusers and 17 abuse allegations in CBS Primary, Kilkenny, over the years. But from O'Flaherty and Coughlan's convictions alone, a sense of the true scale: they alone have 167 convictions and at least 53 victims.
On the state side, there is a cost in prosecuting such trials, involving multiple counts and several victims. The Garda investigation that preceded the cases came at significant cost to Garda time and resources too. Gardai identified 900 people who had been in the school in the relevant years, and pursued inquiries on that basis. They took 88 statements regarding five alleged abusers. Forty-three complainants came forward against O'Flaherty alone.
Of those who have secured convictions, many do not wish to be publicly identified. Some have told their wives of the abuse; others, not. Many did not tell their mother or father, and fear telling them now is too much to ask of elderly parents. Some told their family, but do not want to tell work colleagues. Others do not want anyone to know.
They face the same predicaments many others will soon face — how open they are prepared to be about widespread sexual abuse of young boys in Irish schools over decades and its impact on them as grown men.
One survivor who wishes to remain anonymous queried how other Christian Brothers did not know about Br O'Flaherty. "They had to know", he said. "If the kids knew it, the other teachers knew it —I just can't see how they could not know".
Another survivor recalled that it was talked about in the schoolyard at playtime. "Stay away from him" older boys told younger classes.
The survivor said that O'Flaherty used to squeeze in beside him at his desk or call him up to the teacher's desk on the pretence of reading something out loud. He would also beat him with his fist as he walked by his desk.
He recalled O'Flaherty trying to catch him in the dressing room of the Kilkenny CBS hurling grounds.
"He went to close the door, and I just knew, I knew. He closed it and I couldn't get out. I hit him with a hurl on the side of his face and that shocked him sufficient for me to get away", the man said, "But he hit me a blow on the face as I went out".
The boy's father spotted that the boy had been hit on the face and went to the school the next day. O'Flaherty was gone for three days, the man said. "He never touched me again; he never laid his hands on me again."
One survivor, the smallest boy in his class, suffered an attempted rape by O'Flaherty. In his case, beatings led to sexual abuse. "I didn't know it was happening to anyone else", he said.
O'Flaherty held him back after school on the pretence of improving his long division in maths. He then wrote a school report claiming the boy was not pulling his weight in class.
In later life, the man said he could never fully commit in relationships and his marriage broke down.
Br Martin O'Flaherty's career took him through several other schools in Ireland and in England in various roles, ensuring he had continued access to children until recent years.
He first taught in Tipperary CBS primary school from 1971 to 1973, and then in CBS Greystones primary school until 1975. After Kilkenny, he studied in Dublin until 1985, when he moved to CBS secondary school, Portlaoise, later becoming principal there.
When he left Portlaoise in 1991, he took a sabbatical in England. He was principal of 'North Mon', Cork's CBS North Monastery, from 1993 to 1994.
O'Flaherty was based in the Family Studies Department at Marino Institute for Education from August 1996 to March 2002, where he ran an MIE course for parents in leadership skills for personal, spiritual and faith development, and authored a book on spirituality in adolescence.
A booklet O'Flaherty wrote titled 'Faith Development' was on the recommended reading list for a module of the 'Leaving Cert Applied' Religious Education syllabus. By 2002, he was part of the Christian Brothers' leadership, involved in its decisions on the first state redress scheme for victims of institutional child abuse.
O'Flaherty saw himself as an educator. He was also associated with St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, where he facilitated religious gatherings. By 2006 he was on the Governing Body of MIE.
Christian Brother abuse survivor, Damian O'Farrell said he was shocked when he heard about O'Flaherty's history as an abuser. He had met him through connections to Marino.
"I was in his company a few times. He came across as a very charismatic person", said Mr O'Farrell.
In 2007, when the Christian Brothers in Ireland restructured, creating a new Province for Ireland, England and Rome called the European Province, Martin O'Flaherty continued to be at the core of the leadership, involved in key decisions on its property, its cash assets, its treatment of victims of institutional child abuse during and after the Commission into Child Abuse and the Ryan Report, and its approach to the second redress deal in 2009.
In 2007, he was a founding member and director of New Street Properties Ltd., a trustee company that acts as the property management company for the Christian Brothers and is now called Christian Brothers CLG. He remained in that role until May 2014, and was still recorded as a trustee of several individual properties after that.
O'Flaherty was part of the Christian Brother leadership that developed an approach to its property interests of increasingly entering contracts for sale with developers across Dublin to maximise profits, a policy that has resulted in it squeezing availability of schools' land.
In 2007 also, he was part of the leadership that decided that the congregation would keep assets arising out of the sale of the schools' playing fields it owned, and in 2008, that created a new, lay trust, the Edmund Rice Schools Trust, to which it said it was transferring all its schools.
O'Flaherty and other past and present leadership figures are themselves trustees of many Christian Brother properties. Of the twenty surviving trustees in the Congregation's current and past leadership, a handful have been trustees over several years. O'Flaherty is one of those.
He remained a member of the Province leadership team until May 2014.
He was transferred to England in spring 2016, but before that, he was Chair of the Board of Management of a non-Christian Brother school, Our Lady's of Mourne Road in Drimnagh, having been appointed by another religious schools' trust, CEIST. Chairs of Boards of Management of schools are responsible for overseeing child safety issues in schools, under the statutory framework, 'Children First'.
RTÉ Investigates also examined O'Flaherty's movements in England, where he was appointed a director and trustee of the charity and company holding Christian Brother property assets there. As a Congregation trustee for England, he was a Governor in five preparatory schools owned by the Christian Brothers in England, two of which since closed.
He was also appointed as a trustee of St Anselms College Edmund Rice Academy Trust in March 2017, only stepping down on his transfer back to Ireland in May 2018, as the Garda investigation into him intensified.
The Christian Brothers said that "all allegations of sexual abuse against a Brother or former Christian Brother are notified to the appropriate safeguarding authorities and to the gardai (and to police and church authorities in the UK where appropriate)".
It also said that "pending investigation of such allegations, any Brother against whom allegations were made (whether in Ireland or the UK) were removed from active Ministry or any frontline role involving the education or welfare of children".
However, RTÉ Investigates has established that Martin O'Flaherty had contact with pupils from a number of Christian-Brother connected schools during his time in England, after the Garda investigation had begun, including in March 2018, when he attended an event with pupils from St. Anselm's College, Liverpool, St. Joseph's College, Stoke-on-Trent, and St Ambrose College in Hale Barns, Altrincham, Greater Manchester.
When he was brought back from England in May 2018, while he resigned from roles involving ministries with children, he remained a trustee of the congregation's property assets in England. He resigned from that position in December 2019, almost three years after Gardai first made contact with the Christian Brothers about him in January 2017, and 21 months after the first formal statement to Gardai by one of his victims, in February 2018.
In October 2020, he was arrested and charged in connection with child sexual abuse in Kilkenny CBS Primary School in the late 1970s. He first went on trial in March 2022, and, following six separate trials involving multiple victims, his final conviction was in March this year.
In Ireland, he remained a trustee listed on the deeds of several Christian Brother properties, including some synonymous with the Brothers, such as Synge Street in Dublin 8, and Monkstown CBC, where he was among trustees executing a rectification on the deeds in 2022, over a year after he had already been charged with abuse.
The Christian Brothers trustee company subsequently transferred land it had retained at Monkstown to ERST in July 2022.
In response to RTÉ Investigates, the Christian Brothers, under current Province leader David Gibson, said it "reiterates our apology for the physical and sexual abuse that occurred in many former CBS schools and institutions over several generations."
It said it recognises "the terrible damage that was done to innocent children who should have been protected."
However, in the face of its approach to victims and its record on educational land, the Christian Brothers words ring hollow for many survivors. With the public, it now risks its legacy in education, where its actions, not its words, have been sounding an alarm.