Ireland: 'Br Carlito was not prosecuted' — the Ryan Report's own words for a Resident Manager two bishops and a Garda superintendent all knew about

Proceedings

1. 1955-01-01 · official findings; a mid-1990s Garda investigation into the same Resident Manager also produced no prosecution — the Commission's own conclusion is that he was never prosecuted at any point across a documented 40-year span

   Ireland — Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report, 2009), Vol. 2 ch. 4. In late 1955 the Resident Manager of Greenmount, Br Carlito, and a senior teaching Brother, Br Garcia, were the subject of serious sexual-abuse allegations investigated in parallel by a diocesan Canon (on behalf of Bishop Cornelius Lucey) and a Congregation Visitor; the Superior General's own diary records the Canon reporting 'no doubt about their guilt' and the Bishop saying the same by phone. Br Carlito resigned as Resident Manager on 27th December 1955 but remained in the Congregation, continued teaching in other schools until retirement, and died before the Commission could hear him. Br Garcia obtained a dispensation from his vows in February 1956 and began teaching at a school in Waterford the following Monday. A boy, Michael, had earlier gone directly to Cork's Chief Superintendent, Supt Caffrey — known to him through his father — to report the abuse; the Superintendent drove him and a friend by police car to Bishop Cohalan, who told them 'the Christian Brothers don't do these things at all', called them 'two devils', and threatened to have them excommunicated; they were flogged the next morning. Decades later, in the mid-1990s, the Gardai questioned Br Carlito directly over an allegation that he had sexually interfered with a three-and-a-half-year-old boy; a solicitor's letter to the Provincial recorded that three children in total had alleged sexual interference and that two had been medically found to have been 'buggered'. The Ryan Report states directly: 'Br Carlito was not prosecuted.' The Commission separately found that when the Gardai investigated in the 1990s, 'the information supplied by a senior member of the Congregation was seriously misleading' — meaning the Congregation actively obstructed the one police investigation that did occur, rather than merely omitting to report.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• a boy's direct report to the local Garda Chief Superintendent (by name, via his own father's connection) redirected into a private meeting with the elderly Bishop, who told the boys 'they don't do that', called them 'devils', threatened excommunication, and sent them back to be flogged the next morning
• internal canonical/diocesan visitations run in parallel with, and in place of, any police referral
• dispensation from vows and immediate placement into a new teaching post at Waterford used as the resolution for a second confessed/accused Brother