Vile serial abuser rejects court findings and claims he is the innocent party despite pleading guilty to all his crimes
We confronted unrepentant child molester and convicted paedophile Patrick Curran (77) at his home in Sheskinbeg, Donegal on Friday – hours after he was filmed bargain hunting along the centre aisle in a local discount supermarket.
Curran was released from Mountjoy’s Training Unit on Thursday morning after serving nine months of a one-year prison sentence handed down in October of last year for sexual assaults he carried out on a then 11-year-old Bernard O’Hehir at St John’s National School in Sligo in 1984.
His conviction for sexually assaulting Bernard brought to 10 the number of students that he has been convicted of molesting at the school between 1966 and 1984.
Shockingly, when we asked Curran if he was now finally ready to apologise to his victims, the delusional predator – who pleaded guilty when charged with sexually assaulting Bernard – insisted he has nothing to apologise for.
Former teacher Patrick Curran abused 10 boys
“Certainly not,” the beast responded, when asked if he would say sorry to Bernard and his nine other victims.
“He’s a liar, a compulsive liar.
“Of course, I’m still denying everything.”
When it was put to the serial child predator, who was described in court by Judge Keenan Johnson as a ‘prolific sexual abuser who had abused his position as a teacher’, that he had pleaded guilty to the very offence he is now denying, Curran said he had later tried to withdraw his guilty plea.
“I pleaded guilty on the day because I was kept for six hours and I had two dogs in the car,” he blustered.
“I said I want out of here and I pleaded guilty – but then I changed my mind.
“And then I handed in the affidavit and the judge could have gone either way.”
Asked if he accepted his guilt in the cases of the nine other former pupils he was also correctly convicted of abusing, Curran responded: ‘No! I fought those cases too, but I don’t want to say anything more now.”
Bernard O’Hehir wants to alert people about Patrick Curran
Victim Bernard O’Hehir told the Sunday World on Friday evening that Curran’s vile claims were not surprising to him.
“He is a sick and evil man,” he said. And that is one of the reasons the whole country should know that he is back out of prison. He doesn’t accept that what he did to me and all those other children was wrong.
“He doesn’t accept he is guilty and he had no remorse.
“I can’t do anything about him getting out of prison but I can warn other people that he is free again and that’s why I am speaking out today.”
Curran, who was 48 years old at the time, began grooming Bernard after one of the child’s parents approached him and asked him to keep an eye on their 11-year-old son because he was having a difficult time due to the break-up of their marriage.
Curran began to comfort him and if other boys were mean to him he would tell them not to be.
And he also invited Bernard along to gardening classes on the school grounds he organised and had a number of other boys already attending.
“He kept the boot of his car stuffed with Tayto and sweets for after – looking back now it was grooming plain and simple,” Bernard recalls.
At times he would stay back in Curran’s classroom and speak of the difficulties at home. Curran would try to console him. They would be alone in the room with the door closed.
Bernard O’Hehir as a young boy
“But everything I told him, he ultimately used against me,” Bernard said.
“I was a messer as a child and on one occasion my dad jokingly said he’d have to send me away if I didn’t behave myself.
“After I told Curran that, he held it over me telling my parents would get rid of me if I caused any more trouble.”
On the day of the sexual assault, when alone in the classroom, Curran asked Bernard if he wanted money.
The next thing he says he remembers was Curran sitting close beside him.
The pervert teacher than began to touch him inappropriately while also touching himself and he then unzipped his trousers and tried to get Bernard to touch him through his underwear.
“I’d had enough, I knew it was wrong and I just wanted to get away and that’s when I slapped him. But instead of letting me go, he beat me up, turned me upside down and threw me in the bin.”
Curran’s previous convictions include 192 counts of indecently assaulting nine boys aged eight to 12 between 1966 and 1984.
One of his former victims said that Curran had “played God” and picked the weakest children believing they would say nothing.
Curran is one of four paedophile teachers to have taught at St John’s National School in Sligo, an investigation previously published by this newspaper revealed.
In 2008, Marist brother Martin Meaney (then 65) was jailed for two years on five sample abuse charges.
He denied that a paedophile ring was in operation at the school where he committed his crimes.
Former teacher Curran
In 2005, Peter White (then 74) of Celbridge Abbey, Celbridge, Co. Kildare, was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to eight sample charges of indecent assault on two boys at the school in the 1970s.
And in 1999, retired teacher Michael Cunnane received a three-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to 11 counts of indecently assaulting three boys at the school between 1974 and 1981.
In 2001, he received another suspended three-year sentence after admitting further counts of indecent assaults against five boys.
Gardaí believe as many as 50 boys, and probably many more, were abused at St John’s boys’ primary school in Sligo by religious and lay teachers in a period stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Despite the first informal complaint being made as early as 1983, it took a further 16 years for a dedicated Garda investigation team to be appointed that led to the prosecution of four of its teachers.
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