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BEFORE TEENS TURNED to Instagram or Snapchat to post their thoughts or frustrations, kids scrawled in diaries. Safe in the knowledge that nobody would ever read their innermost thoughts.
One Waterford teenage girl in the 1980s let loose her frustration on paper with brutal honesty. Little could she have known that more than 30 years later those private musings would be published in a report for the whole world to ponder on.
It was at one of the previously undocumented hearings into the abuse of Bill Kenneally in April 2022 that this girl, now a woman in her 50s, had the contents of that long forgotten diary opened for public consumption. It served as a window into the past.
The diary note was revealed this week as part of the lengthy report into Kenneally’s years of abuse and the response by state authorities.
In a story that centres almost entirely on men – a male predator, male victims and a political system dominated by men – it is the private thoughts of one school girl that gives us painful insight into the real cost of the Bill Kenneally abuse case.
She wrote: “God only knows what they’ll all be doing in a year’s time. Some of them probably alcoholics thanks to Bill Kenneally supplying them with fucking drink.”
This single, handwritten line in a teenage girl’s unremarkable diary entry in the 1980s bore a grim prophecy of the fallout from one of Ireland’s most prolific sex abuse scandals.
The Commission reports that this girl lived close to Kenneally in Waterford when she was young. Her social circle at the time was “a happy group” but “she became concerned about Bill Kenneally supplying alcohol to the boys in the group”.
The Commission goes on to describe how she recorded in her diary that Kenneally would drive to the estate and “pull up beyond the entrance and the boys would approach the car”.
She recorded one particular day when he’d parked “near the water tower” where local boys were “being given alcohol from the boot of his car”.
The fact that this child had the observation and intuition to recognise that something was fundamentally wrong is telling.
It begs the question, if a school girl knew something tragic was unfolding – how did the adults that bore witness to the same events not see the same danger?
According to this woman it was an open secret that he was the main and probably only source of alcohol for the boys in the group.
She had no understanding of sexual abuse at the time, but she became concerned about “the change in mood of the boys” and she put this down to them abusing alcohol.
The report noted that “she was angry that alcohol was coming into what she perceived to be a happy environment”.
A picture emerges of stolen youth.
Kenneally’s use of alcohol to groom and brutalise his victims is something that chairman Michael White highlights throughout his report. In total there are 66 references to alcohol.
White, a retired high court judge, documented how Kenneally “used alcohol, money and gifts to assist in grooming and in the commission of the offences”.
Given the age profile of his victims, many as young as 12, it is unsurprising that many of these boys had never consumed alcohol before being introduced to it by Kenneally.
White noted how Kenneally “supplied them with alcohol and cigarettes, and brought them on trips to Tramore and New Ross for the purpose of getting takeaways”.
The judge noted that buying fast food from a takeaway “back in those days was a treat”.
It was after all a time before Just Eat and a McDonald’s in every town.
White found that this “supply of alcohol and encouragement of these youths to consume alcohol was a serious aspect of this exploitation of the youths”.
Evidence of this finding is dotted throughout the report in the harrowing accounts of how alcohol abuse gripped many of the victims.
One man told the inquiry that Bill Kenneally had introduced him to alcohol when he was only 13 and he had not consumed alcohol before. He went on to develop a very strong dependence on drink which affected him into adulthood.
Another man stated that the effect of the abuse was “devastating and lifelong”. He “developed a drinking problem until it became an addiction”.
It affected his education because “he could not concentrate or keep up his effort in school…it took away his childhood”.
The report also describes another victim as “a shy young man” and promising athlete, who stopped his sporting activity and became depressed, before going on to develop an alcohol dependency.
The relationship between alcoholism and childhood sexual abuse is well documented in academic literature, but throughout the reporting on the Bill Kenneally case the focus has been on the barbaric nature of the sexual abuse.
His use of restraints and orange builder’s twine is now, sadly, widely known among those who have followed this case since 2013. Leaving school boys tied to trees in the dead of night to freeze after sexual assaults has also been widely reported.
But there has been little scrutiny of the collision course with alcohol and alcohol dependency that Kenneally forced his victims onto, one bottle at a time.
The report is the first time that the devastating impact of Kenneally’s use of alcohol to groom children has been given due attention.
It paints a disturbing image of a grown man doling out bottles of booze to children from the boot of his Nissan Bluebird, before grooming, handcuffing and abusing them.
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