Jailed ex-Christian Brother made victims feel 'worthless'

"A big dark shadow" is how one victim described former Christian Brother Paul Dunleavey.

"He was a horrible man that loved to give pain, loved to give out pain, and loved to intimidate and, you know, make you feel worthless.

"As I call it, stolen potential, because I think up until then I was going the right way."

The man does not want to be identified, so is being referred to as Survivor A.

Dunleavy first singled him out for bullying when he was in P5, mocking and belittling him in front of his young primary school classmates.

He quickly moved on to physical and sexual abuse, moving from the open classroom to the privacy of his office.

The teacher also used his car to lure some of his pupils into abuse.

"He would have had his car in the car park as you were coming into school and then he would have got you into the car," explains another man, Survivor B.

"It was only a short distance to drive you up the wee hill and he would have put you on his knee and it would have started from there.

"After a few times he would have been fondling you as he was doing that, but he was always there in the morning times to get you into the car and sit on his knee and do this.

"I wasn't the only one it happened to, it happened to loads and loads of pupils."

Read more: Christian Brother given 10 years for abusing children

The abuse then moved to Dunleavey's office when Survivor B and a friend had to go there after being caught mitching from school.

"Then he more or less says to us if you drop your trousers and masturbate, play with yourselves, I won't tell your parents that youse weren't here," Survivor B recalls.

"That was the start, that was the kind of thing that was going on."

I, myself, remember Brother Dunleavy when he taught briefly at the Christian Brothers Secondary School on the Glen Road in west Belfast.

A pupil at the time, I was not aware of his abusive behaviour, but do recall a tall, stern disciplinarian who could instill fear.

Only decades later did I discover that he was a man who had destroyed many young lives.

Dunleavy, now 89, has been sentenced for 36 offences involving nine victims who had been pupils in four Christian Brothers schools in Belfast, Newry and Armagh.

In September, he was found guilty of 31 counts of indecent assault, one of attempted buggery and four of gross indecency.

A number of his victims in the public gallery of Belfast Crown Crown cried and were comforted by family members as they those verdicts were read out.

But those convictions represent just half of his known criminal activity over a 28-year period when he taught in five different primary and secondary schools in Belfast, Armagh and Newry and was headmaster in three of the schools.

Police say he used his trusted position as a respected and influential member of the community to carry out his offending against young people in his care in school, home and other public places.

In 2020, Dunleavy was found guilty of 29 offences involving six victims and was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but those convictions were overturned on appeal.

Then in two further trials in December 2022 and June 2023 he was found guilty of 36 other offences against nine other victims. He has been in prison since being sentenced after the first of those trials in March 2023.

In total, he has now been convicted for 72 historical sex offences committed over a 28-year period from 1964 to 1991 and involving 18 victims.

In each trial, Dunleavy denied his crimes, forcing some of his victims to endure the additional trauma of having to recall their abuse in the witness box.

He has been in prison since March last year when he was sentenced.

The impact of his actions is still being felt decades later.

Survivor A suffered a sense of shame and denial for many years, resulting in heavy drinking, a lack of confidence and relationship problems.

There remains a sense of anger that Dunleavy was able to continue abusing children for many years.

"This man started this two years before I was even born. His first case was in 64, imagine it, and he went to four different schools," says A.

"Why was he allowed to go through all that, why was he allowed to carry on, to go back to schools that he abused in and do it again?"

Survivor B says he knows victims who died by suicide because of what they suffered.

"There's a lot of ones that this happened to, there's a lot of people along the way didn't make it past their teens and twenties, took their own lives because of it.

"Not being able to go and tell their mother and father, their brothers and sisters. It's a guilt that not just me, a few of us, will have to take with us because we witnessed this, we witnessed these things happening but those people aren't here now and there's nobody to tell their story."

Survivor B was one of those who was in court in September to watch as Dunleavy was found guilty.

He was angered that he did not admit his actions and that he had destroyed many lives.

"Every day is a battle, there's days there you don't really think about and then there's days that, bang, it just comes to you again," he says.

"When I faced him across the courtroom I just wanted to get at the man. He was in the dock, I couldn't take my eyes off him. If I had been able to get close to him, I'd have killed him."

In a pre-sentencing hearing last week, a lawyer for Dunleavy asked the judge to show mercy and leniency due to his age.

The barrister said that his client is now 89 and there is a real prospect that he would die in prison if a lengthy sentence was imposed.

Judge Patrick Lynch replied that Dunleavy "showed no mercy to the victims in this case" when they were abused, nor when he made them go into the witness box to give evidence about what had happened to them.