Paul Malpas

Before you read this posting, read “Safeguarding Commissions” posted on 7th October 2010 and “World War 3: The safeguarding Commission v Little Me” posted on 13th October 2010 to get you up to date with this saga. Perhaps you might have done so, then carry on.

The very title, Safeguarding Commission, starts to ask questions. Safeguarding what? Safeguarding who? Well the answer should be “children and vulnerable adults” from the wily ways of clerical officers of the various dioceses. It is supposed to put in place certain protocols and practices that prevent these unfortunate ones from being abused by the deviant behaviour of the officers of the Church.

In practice however, whilst the above might be correct, the vast part of their work is devoted, unsuccessfully, to safeguarding the name and reputation of that broken organization, the Catholic Church. 90% of their time, the Safeguarding Commission is standing in front of a tidal wave of accusation and allegation trying impossibly to ward off this tsunami which is about to overwhelm the stricken Church and during this 90% of their time, they have no time, concern or feeling for the abused children and vulnerable adults. These poor creatures are completely overlooked.

How do I know this, well I have witnessed it for the last few months and various survivors of abuse from all over the country have written to me telling of the terrible treatment they have received from these Safeguarding Commissions and the Church.

The Church now is so immune to criticism and overloaded with allegation, they will admit to anything and roll over. Damage limitation is the name of their game, so the quicker they roll over, the less information they have to give out and the less heed they pay to victims and so they think, the less damage is done to the Church. A large proportion of victims are denied their opportunity to describe their abuse and therefore to challenge for compensation in whatever form.

The words to describe this canonical philosophy are heartless, cruel and damaging but the Commissions spout honesty, openness and transparency. Only the Secret Services of major countries can put spin on these words like the Catholic Church does.

My battle with the Safeguarding Commission of the Salford Diocese started in earnest on 8th October 2010, a Friday afternoon, and Fr. O’Sullivan, the Coordinater of the Commission, telephoned me with some very important information. Himself and Mike Devlin, a solicitor and Chair of the Commission had sat down with the Bishop of Salford, Terence Brain, Monsignor Michael Quinlan, the Chair of Governors of St. Bede’s College, and Mr. Michael Barber, the Headmaster of St Bede’s College and come up with some “very serious and sensitive information” about Monsignor Thomas Duggan. Thomas Duggan was the Rector of St. Bede’s College, my alma mater, from 1950-1966. I had been running a campaign against this man because of his mental, physical and sexual abuse of young boys at the College within his tenure and we had already had a meeting with the Commission to put forward our findings.

This information was so “serious and sensitive” that Fr. O’Sullivan felt he could not talk about it over the phone or communicate by e-mail and he asked me to come to Manchester to discuss it, from my home in Roscommon in Ireland. So I thought this must be the break-through we were looking for and we arranged to meet in Manchester on 5th November 2010. He did say that the information was so compelling that he would not be interviewing my witnesses and that the Diocese considered that something serious had happened at St. Bede’s all those years ago.

Just prior to this telephone conversation and in the spirit of “openness and transparency” that the Commission exuded, I had decided to let the recording of our first meeting in September go into the public domain. There had been no talk of confidentiality at the meeting and the Chair, Mike Devlin, insisted that we had no status, and I thought that as nothing of any value was discussed, why not let it out.

Fr. O’Sullivan found out about this on Monday, 11th October and he again telephoned me and lambasted me for my “massive breach of confidentiality”. He harangued me for about 30 seconds before slamming down the telephone in mid-sentence. I did not get chance to say a word. There followed a flurry of e-mails over a three week period where the proposed 5th November meeting was on and then off, like the proverbial whore’s drawers and where his tone and language was most unholy and not priest-like.

Eventually he said that because I was an “incompetent and untrustworthy advocate” he could not recognize me and because I did not exist in his eyes, it would be impractical for me to go to the meeting. It was like the defence counsel sacking the prosecuting barrister, a new twist on the law and one that would solve a lot of problems in the judicial system if allowed. This decision of his was unfortunate, stupid and immature because I was the one who had made the original complaint, I was the only one who knew the victims. So how could he give out this “serious and sensitive ” information to others without me knowing about it. My problem was that I knew too much and that made him uncomfortable.

However he was adamant and I realised that this meeting would never take place if I turned up, so I resigned my position in the campaign and let others take my place. People who O’Sullivan would feel comfortable with. His parting shot was to threaten me with litigation, saying the Diocesan lawyers would sue me for “Deformation”. This word led to another flurry of e-mails and comments on the blog of a humourous nature and I suitably ignored his stupid threats.

Now it strikes me that lambasts over the telephone, bullying e-mails and telephone conversations and threats of litigation should not be the currency of the Catholic Church and its sub-divisions, but this is how these Safeguarding Commissions work and it is not just Salford Diocese, other dioceses react in exactly the same way. Damage limitation, sparse truths, legal battles and bullying attempts at victims silence and litigation threats at anybody who asks to many questions should surely not be the tools of a holy and religious body but organizations like the Inquisition have been proving it has been the case for nearly 900 years. It is nothing new, it has just been refined.

As part of my retired life, I spend a lot of my time on research which turns into a wild goose chase, I run into a brick wall and cannot get any further, but I hope this particular recent subject will not.  I am already fond of this family and I do not properly know them yet.

This line of research concerns the Dignan family of Ballinagard House, which is  situated two kilometres south of Roscommon town on the Athleague or Galway road.  It was a large house of 12 rooms and was owned at the time ie the turn of the 20th Century by Charles Coleman Dignan, the Under Sheriff of Roscommon.  The Under Sheriff as far as I know is or was a court official, normally a solicitor, who carried out the wishes of the courts.  For example he might organize bailiffs to enter a property to seize goods etc, or he might be responsible for the serving of summonses.

Charles Coleman Dignan had lived in Roscommon all his life, born in 1858 and marrying his wife, a local woman, Angelina Victoria in early 1886.  He was 28, she was 21.  During their marriage Angelina had 10 pregnancies, one a still birth,  the other eight surviving well into adulthood.  They were:-

Maud M born in 1886

Joseph Patrick born in 1888.

Eveleen Victoria born in1891.

Alfred Charles born in 1892.

Albert Guy born in 1894.

Mabel B. born in1897.

Cecil Joseph born in 1899.

Hilda Angelina born in 1902.

Ethel W. born in 1906.

Ballinagard House was a fine stone built house with a slated roof, it had six outhouses consisting of a stable, a harness room. a coach house, a cowshed, a dairy and a hen house.  They had one live-in sevant, but there must have been others who lived in a cluster of dwellings round the big house like the King’s and the Igoe’s who classed themselves as agricultural labourers and Edward Flanagan who classed himself as a groom/domestic servant in the 1911 census.

The Dignan family, all practising Catholics, were doing well for themselves and were stalwarts of polite Roscommon society and it can be seen that like the majority of people in Ireland at this time, although born and bred in the country, in this case Roscommon, they would have considered themselves happy to be part of Queen Victoria’s Empire.  Look at the names they gave their children, except for Joseph Patrick, the rest of the names could be from anywhere in England.  Ireland to them was as much part of England as Lancashire or Warwickshire.

All the children as far as I know did their basic education at Roscommon National School before being finished off at a convent or Grammer School and this is where I come in.  Joseph Patrick, when he was 14 years and 10 months old, was sent to St. Bede’s College in Manchester for two further years of education, 1903-1905, Alfred Charles attended 1906-1909 and Albert Guy 1908-191911.   St. Bede’s was the school I went to 1957-1963.  We have all something in common, we have all knelt in the same little chapel, built in 1895, at the school, doing penance for our sins,  we have all walked its long dark corridors and we have all had the rudiments of Latin, Greek, Mathematics and English Literature chisled onto our brains, never to be forgotten.

Joseph Patrick left St. Bede’s in the summer of 1905 after presumably boarding at the school for two years, he became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, where he was probably posted to some far flung branch.  He certainly was not working in Roscommon at the time of the Census in 1911.  At the moment I do not know where he spent the years 1905-1914, but in September 1914 he enlisted as a Private soldier in the 19th (Service) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment, which suggests to me that he was back working in Manchester at that time.  He put down his occupation as clerk, not bank clerk, which would have given him extra Kudos, but just plain clerk.  He might have had relations in the town whom he lived and worked with and who he might have lived with while at St. Bede’s.  All these questions I hope to answer shortly; I do seem to remember my mother speaking of a business family in North Manchester called Dignan, who were big in the Church and in Commerce.

Anyway after seven months training as a private soldier, without going overseas, he applied for and received his commission, as a 2nd Lieutenant in his local regiment, the Connaught Rangers, on 22 May 1915, in fact in the 4th battalion, which normally had a home at King House, the barracks in Boyle, Co Roscommon, where I was yesterday.  Myself and Joseph Patrick Dignan have a lot in common.

The sad part of this story is that from the 4th Battalion, which was a reserve Battalion suppling troops to the 1st, 5th and 6th Battalions of the Connaught Rangers in the field. he was attached to the 8th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, who were stationed at Finner Camp in South Donegal.  In February 1916 they were posted to France, to the Loos sector where they had their first taste of the trenches at the end of that relentless and hopelessly inefficient Battle of Loos that had started the previous September.  From there they were  moved south to take part in the latter stages of the Somme offensive where they succeeded in capturing the heavily defended village of Ginchy in September 1916 before being moved up to the southern end of Ypres to Wyschaete where Joseph Patrick sadly met his end on 16th October aged 28, taking part in a night patrol.  He is buried in Kemmel Chateau Military Cemetery.

His two younger brothers, Alfred Charles and Albert Guy, were both commissioned and served with the South Irish Horse, a cavalry regiment, after enlisting in 1914.  Their young brother, Cecil Joseph, was stopped from going to St. Bede’s, like his brothers, because of the war but he once he became 18 in 1917 and he too was commissioned into the South Irish Horse in 1918.  The South Irish Horse had been turned into an infantry regiment in 1917 because of the need for foot soldiers and became the 7th (South Irish Horse) Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, which was virtually wiped out on 21st March 1918 on that first day of the German Spring Offensive.  The South Irish Horse were stationed at Poziere, a few miles out of Albert on the Bapaume road as the Germans threw everything they had at the British army in a last ditch attempt at breaking the four year stalemate tjhat was the Western Front and  ending the war.  Despite early successes the Germans were halted and gradually forced back.  Lt. Albert Guy Dignan was 23  on that first day, his body was never found and he is remembered on the Poziere Memorial in the Poziere British Cemetery.

Charles Coleman Dignan, the Lieutenant Recruiting Officer for the town and district of Roscommon paid a heavy price for his duties to King and Country with the loss of his two sons.

If anybody reads this blog and can add to this story in any way please contact me through the comments section of the blog or e-mail me on malpas46@eircom.net.  In the months to come I hope to have a fuller version of this family’s story.

Thank you for reading this post and to Joseph Patrick and Albert Guy Rest in Peace.  They will never be forgotten.

Finally I would like to thank Oliver Fallon, Chairman and Chief Researcher of the Connaught Rangers for some of the military facts in this blog.

I have just been watching the film by Jason Berry of Marciel Maciel, a Mexican Catholic priest, who formed the religious orders of Legion Of Christ for men and Regnum Christie for women.  Both orders have massive support in the Americas and since the 1940s Maciel had been fund raising and building seminaries there for fledgling priests.   Numbering among his many benefactors is Carlos Slim, reputed to be the world’s richest man with a net worth of $53.5 billion.  Maciel was nearly canonized before he died, so highly did the Vatican think of him.

However from the late 1990s allegations of abuse and sexual malpractice against this man started to arise, so much so that Pope John Paul II ordered an investigation into Maciel’s organization and personal habits.  Before this investigation could bear fruit, Maciel became ill and the Vatican decided to close down the proceedings so that he could die with dignity, and this he did in 2002.

Suspicions and allegations still hung around however and eventually it came out that the man was not only a serial abuser of his own priests and seminarians, he also had women in Spain, Mexico and America who bore him children on a regular basis that were also abused by him.  Not only that but he had been putting money aside for his own use out of benefactors donations to build and develop property in various countries.  Certainly in Spain where he has at least three children.

This fact came to life when three of these Spanish children came forward with legal documents proving that they were his children and had beneficial ownership of properties that the Church was trying to claw back from his estate.  Last year Ratzinger set up another investigation into the man and his empire.  It is a television programme not to miss.  It is called Vows Of Silence. There is another by director Mary Healey called Holy Watergate.  Both these films show how it was in America, we have yet got it to come.

You just wonder about Maciel, with all his shagging how he had time for mass and prayer.  The only good thing in his favour is that he followed up John Paul II’s teaching on birth control.  He never used a johnnie.

Funnily enough when I get thinking about clerical abusers my mind always turns to Thomas Duggan, the bane of many a young boy’s life in Manchester in the 1950s and 60s.  For any of you who missed them, my blogs The Aftermath of a St. Bede’s Education on 5th April 2010, Monsignor Thomas Duggan on 31st March 2010 andThe Staff of St. Bede’s College on 18th March 2010 explain in some detail what this unholy man was about.  From correspondence I am receiving you all say that in the light of this recent clerical abuse scandal, as a man you reached for your keyboards to see if at long last  Tommy Duggan had been outed.  There was nothing at all about him only my blog but it strikes me that their first reaction says a lot.  Within the letters and e-mails received are the following bare bones of his life:-

Born in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire in about 1906

Educated at St. Bede’s College     1917-1923

Member of Staff at St. Bede’s        1933-1936  &  1940-1950

Rector of St. Bede’s                            1950-1966

Priest at St. Mary’s, Langho            1966-1968

Died in Langho, which is to the north of Blackburn in 1968.

From these bones a few questions need to be asked:-

1 )  Where was he between the years 1923-1928?  Presumably at a seminary.

2 )  Where was he between the years 1928-1933?

3 )  Where was he between the years 1936-1940?  I did hear he had some Vatican training but when and in what form.

4 )  With no offence to the people of Langho, why was he moved at short notice to this isolated place?  He was a powerful man in the diocesan hierarchy, why would his obvious talents be helpful to Langho?  Geoff Burke, the incoming Monsignor and Rector said in Baeda’s winter edition 1968 that he was sent on “new work which the Lord Bishop has asked him to do in the parish”.  In my experience any priest who is sent up north at a minute’s notice has sinned most greviously.

If anyone out there  can confirm or deny the above presumed facts please get in touch or if they can add anything to the pot or speak of their experiences contact me on e-mail at malpas46@eircom.net.  My main area of concern with this man is his abuse of power by physically, mentally and sexually assaulting the pupils under his control in the 16 years he was Rector of St. Bede’s College.  There is a hell of a lot of hurt out there even after 50 or 60 years.

Please continue to write into me about Duggan with any little morsel so that my report can be finished and sent off to all those past pupils who contribute and also to the Salford Diocesan Authorities.  All we can really hope for is an apology, but from correspondence received it is obvious this man blighted many young Catholic boys’  lives

In the summer of 1963 after my short interview with Monsignor Duggan, Rector of St. Bede’s College and supreme factotum of life as we knew it, when he consigned me to the scrapheap of infidels, I was working for Jim Connor converting two large Victorian houses on Laindon Road in Manchester into a home for wayward girls as they so succinctly put it at the time.  These poor girls were unmarried mothers who under the prevailing custom of the time had also been thrown on the scrapheap of life.  The home was run by the Sisters of Charity, who ran the convent school of St. Joseph’s opposite.  Little did I know it at the time but as I was accommodating these unmarried mothers, one of the horde of sprightly green blazered virgins, who poured through the gate across the road every morning, was my future wife, the dear Helen, enjoying the last ten years of her single life.

Besides catching rats under the floorboards and killing them with a claw hammer, my main source of entertainment was talking to the tradesmen, Jim had employed to complete the works.   They were the first proper working men I had ever spoken to at length and I was taking in everything they said.  With the enforced departure from my alma mater and because of the total lack of vocational education at St. Bede’s, I had not a clue in which direction to pitch myself.  I had no idea about what was needed for what except that I could do anything if I wanted to.  It was the “wanted to” that was the problem.

These joiners, plumbers and plasterers were singing the praises of a “posh” job, a quantity surveyor.  I had never heard of it and I did not have a clue on how to go about finding out.

I answered an advertisement my mother spotted in the newspaper.  My mother was great at finding work for her family.  This was for the post of junior quantity surveyor in a practice owned and run by the son of a well known architect in Manchester, whom my mother had served dinner to as part of her employ. He was gushing and thought that I was absolutely suitable for what he had in mind but because Duggan and Burke, the educators not body snatchers, had assigned me to Classics at the age of twelve and therefore never learnt Physics, he had to let me go.  I have always wondered why because Physics forms no part of the quantity surveying brief and afterwards this lack of knowledge never impeded me.  Even now I do not know what physics is, nor do I care except I get stuck on certain questions on University Challenge.  My Classics education taught me how to do crosswords and I have been very happy in that knowledge.

My father could see that I had been inspired by this prototype job hunt and asked a mate of his, Gabriel Hopkins, who was well qualified in this sphere and could swear like a trooper and owned a creamery on Thoresway Road.  He came up with a chap called Phil Seaston, an Old Bedian and a partner in a large firm of consulting engineers, C. S. Allott & Sons, who were designing all the 250 megawatt power stations that were being built at the time as part of the Conservative Government’s plan to light up Britain.  Phil, to his credit, saw a spark of life in me and immediately took me on, impressed with my grasp of Latin and Attic Greek and I started there as a lowly member of the quantity surveying team on £4 12s 6d per week.  My overjoyment was subdued, I had been earning about £8 per week with Jim Connor catching rats for fun.  However I worked with Jim at weekends.  Toffs during the week, hardcases at weekends: it kept my feet on the ground.

This employment of mine was before the days of computers and mechanical aids for working out mathematical sums, although we did have an abacus.  My job was to act as a calculator for the team.  The quantity surveyors were so highly paid they did not have time for the mundane, so in order to work out the quantities involved with each trade, they would write the sum down and I would have to do the calculation.  Whether it be in Trigonometry, Geometry or simple decimals or duodecimals.  I was only middling at school but after my first year at Allott’s, I was damn good, doing thousands of these calculations every day and funnily enough I enjoyed it.  I was better than a bookie at mental arithmetic.

Intellect was a sparse commodity in Longsight where I lived and my first impressions of this proper job was amazement at the intelligence of most of my colleagues coupled with their ability to have a damn good time outside of work.

Most of them were ex-Royal Engineers or young single fellows out of university.  The army was slowly winding itself down from its peak after the war and during its busy period in the 1950s when the world looked as though it might kick off again.  These Royal Engineers were really well trained as only the Army knows how and they bolstered the Construction Industry in the early 1960s as it was taking off to build the New Britain.

The office was a league of nations, with Poles, French, Turks, Africans and Asians of all nationalities and religions, Sikhs, Muslims, Bhuddists, and the oriental gents who did not seem to have any religion; all put there by their respective governments to learn their trade from one of the best establishments of its kind in that post colonial era.

Every month we used to book the back room of the Bird in Hand, a pub in Mobberly,  which was miles away in the country. How we got there and back I cannot remember, but life was not clouded then with any drinking and driving laws.  Someone played the piano and a few sang daring songs and more played cards or skittles but we all drank twice our fill.

On pay day at the end of each month, we used to have an eating competition.  Who could eat the most Gam Guk Specials.  The Gam Guk Gardens was a chinese restaurant opposite our offices at 100 Washway Road in Sale.  It must have been one of the first suburban oriental restaurants to open.  Its starter every day was brown Windsor soup.  We used to spice it up with half a bottle of Worcester sauce.  The winner of this competition had all his costs paid by the other competitors.  I won a few times but I was always hard pressed by a bald headed, bearded Turk called Gonen, who went by the nickname of Donkey Dick.  I can only presume his first name was Richard, which is strange for a Turk.

More tomorrow, Bye.