Over the years, since I first wrote about Joseph Marmion, I have heard first-hand accounts of his modus operandi, of his sexual and violent assaults, his emotional attacks and his simple cruelty. I have also read accounts of the same by people whom I’ve never met. It’s certainly not something I ever set out to achieve but I suppose you could say that I’ve developed an expertise in Marmion’s behaviour over the years in which he was in contact with young boys at Belvedere, the Crescent and Clongowes.
My personal experience of his abuse was mercifully limited and never sexual. He appeared to like me up to a point; I was, like everyone else in my class, simply scared of him. My experience of him as a teacher ceased at the end of First Syntax (fourth year) in 1975 and my Poetry and Rhetoric years were blissfully Marmion-free. And I began to realise what an unpleasant man he was. Everyone knew that he was a bully, including his fellow Jesuits; some of us knew that he was obsessed with “the sin of masturbation” and that he had naked small boys alone in his room. How his fellow Jesuits didn’t twig that, I will never understand.
By the time I was sixteen, and no longer viscerally scared of the man, I had come to loathe him, as had most of my friends. However, as a teenager with a very limited experience of the world, I suppose I didn’t realise that a school should not harbour a violent, cruel paedophile. And yes, I did know what that word meant back then. It seemed, in some bizarre sense, just the way it was. And, of course, as we know now, it was far from unusual for schools to be staffed by paedophiles and sadists. No doubt they are still with us, but one hopes, finding it harder to indulge their perversions.
Anyway, the encyclopaedic knowledge of Marmion’s - let’s just call them what they were: crimes - that I somewhat unwillingly acquired over the past few years did not come without a degree of trauma. I had the benefit of excellent counselling, which was paid for by the Jesuits and for which I am most grateful. Some things can never be unheard or unknown and it’s important to process them in a way that protects oneself.
This knowledge will, no doubt, remain incomplete. However, the other day I spoke with someone whose life was severely damaged - pretty well destroyed - by Marmion, and I was struck by the story he told me of his first violent encounter with him. Anyone who was at Belvedere in mid-1970s will readily conjure up the dim scene, the after-school atmosphere, the Music Room, opposite the Chapel, the daylight of the school yard glimpsed through those heavy gothic doors.