Ireland: Glin industrial school — a confessed abuser offered the choice of 'apply for a dispensation or stand trial', and the Congregation chose neither

Proceedings

1. 1944-01-01 · official findings, internal Church tribunal only — no criminal proceedings found anywhere in the chapter

   Ireland — Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report, 2009), Vol. 1 ch. 11. While resident in Artane, Br Buiron confessed to the Superior that he had sexually abused a boy in the infirmary; General Council minutes record the Superior General telling him directly that he could 'apply for a dispensation or stand trial' and citing two Brothers 'hanged in Canada' and another awaiting murder trial in Rome for comparable offences as the stakes. Br Buiron refused to apply for a dispensation and appeared before the General Council — which then voted unanimously NOT to send him for trial, retaining him with a canonical warning and a penance instead, and transferring him first to Cork and then to Glin, where he served almost seven years. Separately, Br Piperel — already the subject of a serious sexual-interference complaint in Letterfrack that was investigated only by a Visitor's letter — was transferred to Glin, then to Cork, where his conduct toward young girls caused an urgent removal into retirement; no criminal referral is recorded at any stage of his career. The Commission's own general conclusion for the chapter states plainly that both men were sent to Glin specifically after complaints or suspicions of sexual abuse elsewhere, calling the decision 'reckless'.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• an explicit internal choice between criminal trial and Church discipline, decided in favour of discipline
• repeated transfer of Brothers with known or confessed histories of sexual abuse into a residential school where children had 'no recourse to their families'