The Supreme Court considered the liability of a Marist Brother’s Provincial in a civil case brought by a former pupil who said he was sexually abused by his teacher at St John’s National School in Sligo between 1969 and 1972. The Court heard an appeal from a High Court judgment that had found the Provincial liable and awarded damages.
The High Court had accepted the pupil’s evidence, which four former classmates corroborated, and rejected the teacher’s denial. The Supreme Court judgment says the finding that the pupil was abused was not in issue on appeal. The teacher was ordered to pay €350,000 in general damages, but the High Court reduced that sum to €315,000 after attributing 10 per cent responsibility to the school manager, who had not been sued.
O’Donnell J. found the evidence about the relationship between the Marist Order and the school too fragmentary to establish that the Order controlled the teacher’s work. He nevertheless concluded that, in principle, members of a religious order could be vicariously liable for a fellow member’s abuse where it was sufficiently connected to the Order’s mission. He treated the Provincial as liable on the narrow basis that he was a member of the Order and that the defence had not pleaded or proved he joined after the abuse.
O’Donnell J. rejected the High Court’s approach of treating the unincorporated Marist Order as if it were a corporation. He also concluded that the school manager and the Order should share responsibility equally, rather than in the 85-to-15 proportions used by the High Court. Because the manager’s claim was time-barred, the pupil was deemed responsible for that concurrent wrongdoer’s liability under the Civil Liability Act.
O’Donnell J. would reduce the general damages to €150,000 and, after the equal apportionment, leave an award of €75,000. He would dismiss the pupil’s challenge to being held responsible for the manager’s share. The source does not set out the Court’s final order or the result of the appeal as a whole. It records that Charleton J. disagreed with upholding liability on O’Donnell J.’s narrow basis and proposed remitting the case to the High Court to consider a different legal basis. O’Donnell J. did not agree to that course.