Unfortunately today’s text is a long one, but persevere and I hope its strands make sense in the end.
After yesterday’s posting I received a very powerful e-mail from a lady, Katy Attwood, an ex-Bedian who graduated from Oxford University and has since carved out a successful career in the hard earned world of business in Manchester. At the outset she started to talk about John Byrne’s, 25 year plus control of St Bede’s from the early 1980s until 2007 when he eventually let go of the reins. Now although there was a lot that could be said against his character and personality and how it seemed football and not academia was his over-riding passion, a lot could be said for him on his ability to run a tight ship but he did leave a lot of baggage behind him in terms of Fr William Green’s abuse of boys under his watch and other clerical abusers that have not yet seen the light of day.
Also and fairly importantly, he left behind him a phalanx of disgruntled but highly intelligent former pupils not happy at all with the way he handled his tenure and who now form the backbone of legal, commercial and medical life in the North West and who would never contemplate sending their children to Bede’s. This is part of the socio-economic bracket I have mentioned before in previous blog postings, the 35-40 year old parent with enough spare money to afford a St Bede’s education. What the school did to take up this disaffected cohort was to attract parents who had previously no prior relationship with the school, people who had made their money on the back of the commercial roller coaster of the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the downturn in the economic landscape of the past six or seven years, this group of parents diminished considerably but given the right acumen this same group could have been garnered, to continue the demand for good education that St Bede’s rightly attracted previously.
I think Michael Barber, who followed John Byrne, understood and realised all of this and amongst other things toned down this archaic demand for discipline, presumably emanating from this angry bunch of celibate (?) bachelors who had been ruling the school as governors for 20 years or more. Mr Barber decided to make the school more attractive, more pupil friendly, than it had ever been. Examination results proved he was on the right road, entry levels stayed high, parents liked him and more importantly the children did as well. Why he left we will never know, unless the florid Quinlan opens up but then we could never believe him, a man of 70 steeped in Catholicism is bound to be and as proven to be an inveterate liar.
So let us get back to Katy, the lady who e-mailed me, an intelligent, hard working business woman with a large family of five children, a past boon to St Bede’s coffers, who has the means but would never dream of sending her children to the present St Bede’s, where she and her father before her were educated and although she lives in its catchment area. She says verbatim in her e-mail:
“The demise of St Bede’s is down to the following things and some have a larger role to play than others;
1.) The incompetency of Daniel Kearney as Headmaster.
2.) The aftermath of Fr Green’s abuse.
3.) The historic abuse of Monsignor Duggan.
4.) Paul Malpas’ blog.
5.) The google adwords campaign that ran for two months about child abuse at St Bede’s.
6.) The Wikipedia entry with the audio files about the safeguarding interview.
7.) The Murphy Report regarding the Archdiocese Of Dublin in November 2009 and its ramifications over here.
8.) The hubris of the Salford Diocese
It’s all of these frankly. I will leave it to you guys to decide what percentage each element can claim. But, Daniel Kearney’s incompetency is the major one. As is Salford’s handling. This could all have been sorted much more easily by clever business people. But these people are not clever, have no business acumen and persist in the delusion that they are industrious intellectuals properly earning their salaries. When in fact they are scrounging dullards who have never had an original thought in their lives. Pricks.
Anyway I certainly think the Malpas’ have had a part to play but I take no glee. Nor do I really care. It’s all energy. We have played the part of brooms. And just as I don’t emotionally engage in sweeping shite up, nor do I find much pleasure in watching Bede’s downfall.
That institution has no part to play in the new world that is dawning”
Strong true and accurate words from a product of this failing behemoth and if you have not completely guessed it, Katy is my daughter, sending a totally unsolicited e-mail, a totally powerful piece from a lady who has been there and done it.
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Let us now take a quick look at each one of her eight points and examine them in slightly more detail.
1.) The incompetency of Daniel Kearney. He was promoted from within, not a good thing in such a sensitive position with a potential crisis looming. He had few friends on the staff and he was replacing a well liked Michael Barber. He was disliked by most pupils, in as much as they had no respect for his conservative Catholicism (he was Head of Religion), his relish of historic discipline and his apparent sexist thinking. His only virtue it seemed was that he had been at the school for ten years and reeked of the Catholicism that the aging governors loved. He had never showed himself to be an intelligent leader of people, he even harboured the grudge he had against Barber, after being passed over in his application for Head two years previously. He has in the last two years proven himself to be a catastrophic failure, mentally fragile. He needed a good guy to back him up, he chose another bad guy.
2.) Fr Green’s abuse.
The elephant in the room since the middle 1990s, rumours in fact had been floating around since the late 1970s but it was not until 2006 did the denouemont occur. A black stain on the College for over 25 years. John Byrne kept a tight lid on it all during his tenure but failed spectacularly in the end, probably one of the reasons for his decision to cash in his chips. However the man who supervised Green’s whole reign was the fawning, obsequious Classics master and then Rector of the College, a product of the vile Monsignor Duggan, Fr later Monsignor Terence Dodgeon, who stumbled through his priestly life and then disappeared off our screens in 2006 as Green attended court and who is now living very discretely in a cottage in North Lancashire. One not very nice man, who we might here more of in the future if his own sorry tale is ever told.
3.) Monsignor Thomas Duggan.
Recently news of his longstanding and historical abuse of boys in the 1950s and 1960s has done the College no good at all following on the heels of Green. If Green was the modern elephant in the room, Duggan was the historic mammoth since his ascendency in 1950. Time will probably show us that not only was Duggan the catalyst for the demise of St Bede’s but he will probably prove to be the catalyst for the demise of the Salford Diocese.
4.) PaulMalpas.com, my blog. My interest in this subject originated in my quest for justice for boys Thomas Duggan had harmed in the 1950s and 60s. However with my quest more or less sorted and a forthcoming law suit against the Salford Diocese on the horizon, the upheaval caused by Michael Barber’s leaving and Kearney’s successful putsch took over my campaigning void. I realised that what was happening was wrong, with Quinlan trying to pull the wool over parents eyes with that little note he sent them all in June 2011. My fervour to open up this bag of worms was strengthened by the ever increasing band of disaffected people who were not at all happy with the present regime. As Katy said in her e-mail all we have done is acted as brooms, we do not like shite littering the floor of our house. I thank all those people who have written to me, they are the truth sayers, I once again am just a conduit to let the truth flow.
5.) The Google Adwords campaign that ran for two months about child abuse at St Bede’s.
An astute and enterprising transatlantic bunch of legal eagles decided a few months back to take advantage of an increase of traffic searching for information on St Bede’s and set up a Google Adwords campaign targeting victims of abuse. To the uninitiated, what this means is that whenever anyone searched for information regarding the College, a bloody big advert would appear saying “Are you a victim of abuse at St Bede’s?” The effect of this I imagine would have been two-fold. Firstly it would have attracted people who were abused or who know about abuse at the Alma Mater. Secondly it would have rather put off a prospective parent, don’t you think?
6.) The Wikipedia entry with the audio file about the safeguarding commission interview.
If you go onto the Wikipedia page on St Bede’s there is the “Reports of Abuse” section, itself a rather torrid summary of information for any educational establishment, especially one which relies on parents’ money and is so squarely situated amongst top notch competition. Added to the Fr. Green stuff is also some information on our beloved Duggan. The person who put this up (and it was not me as I haven’t a clue about Wikipedia) informed me some time back that every time they put up the information, one of St Bede’s disinformation agents would take it down. Within hours. That person simply went in every day and put it back up again. And finally, with the addition of some hardcore evidence in the form of an MP3 file of a meeting I had with the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese in which they openly admitted the abuse took place, the powers that be at Wikipedia were sufficiently convinced of the veracity as to make that particular piece of information immutable. So now, prospective parents doing their background checks as all parents should, are faced with not one admission of abuse but two and a nagging feeling regarding tips of icebergs. “Let’s check out Manchester Grammar, shall we? And Withington Girls. And Stockport Grammar and Cheadle Hulme Grammar, and Alderley Edge and Manchester High and Loreto and Altrincham and North Cestrian. Oh what a choice we have.” No wonder Kearney could only find 40 eventually highly subsidised guinea pigs to taste his brand of education
7.) The Murphy Report and its ramifications.
This report by Judge Yvonne Murphy opened the door to truth in Ireland in November 2009. It turned me from a fully fledged 63 year old Catholic, father of six children, into a spitting viper at the corporate deception of the Church over my lifetime and beyond. I am no longer a Catholic, my church is my conscience, I no longer believe in that ceremonious clap trap I was bamboozled with for 60 odd years and I am sure that is true for millions of people, not just in Manchester and Ireland but around the world. They can no longer feed us shite, our taste have now developed onto a much higher table.
8.) The hubris of the Salford Diocese.
It is laughable how the Salford Diocese react to crisis and honest enquiry, I have been suffering them since 2009. Immediately they sense pressure, truth goes out of the window and deviousness creeps under the door. Why a religion, a supposed upholder of good and righteousness believes this way is a conundrum of vast proportion that is not expected or warranted. In their ceremony and teaching the Truth is the epitomy of their belief. Why go on the defensive when the truth is asked for. These people who run Salford and the College are scared, negative, non-celibates, who live their life bound up in a lie. Richard Sipe that famous ex-Benedictine monk in America who has lived his adult life studying celibacy, states that from his research at any one time 50% of priests are sexually active. If they can lie in the face of such an elemental part of their lives, they can lie about anything, so that when they become sexually non-active as with the rump of the present College governors, who are all well into their 70s, their hubris at having successfully covered up this lie, comes to the surface and this same false excessive self confidence is shown in all aspects of their lives to the detriment of everything and everyone around them. They exude false ideas and thoughts, they exude the love they have for the Church and its flock, whereas their emotional maturity stopped when they were 11 or 12. They have no care for anybody other than themselves, they should not because of this, have any responsibility. Unfortunately they have and stacks of it, to our detriment