Joanne Mccarthy: Silence Has Been Broken

Newcastle Herald
July 19, 2013

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1647945/joanne-mccarthy-silence-has-been-broken/?cs=308

ONE year ago tonight Belmont North man John Pirona had dinner with his wife Tracey and their two daughters, left the family home and wrote a letter.

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Tracey Pirona found the letter the next morning, with its devastating final words "Too much pain", and rang police.

Her husband's body was found five days later.

John Pirona was 12 in 1979 when he was sexually assaulted by a notorious Hunter paedophile priest. He was a victim of the priest one year after both a school principal, Father Tom Brennan, and the then Maitland-Newcastle Bishop Leo Clarke, were told the priest was molesting students.

John Pirona was a NSW fireman who rang me three or four times in the year before his death to say hello and talk about how he was going. Pirona, like many victims of the notorious priest, was distressed by the Catholic Church's failure to act after Brennan was convicted in 2009 of making a false statement to police.

In that statement Brennan repeatedly denied ever being told about child sex allegations involving the priest. A subsequent court case showed just how many people had told him.

John Pirona's final words, "Too much pain", became the rallying cry for a community that had witnessed too much pain because of child sex abuse.

His death, and his family's courageous decision to speak despite their grief, was the tipping point that launched the Herald's Shine the Light campaign for a royal commission. That campaign led to the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry, which started in Newcastle in May, and the federal Royal Commission which will hold public hearings later this year.

The NSW Special Commission of Inquiry, investigating NSW Police and Catholic Church handling of child sex abuse allegations in the Hunter, has heard a lot about this newspaper's reporting of the issue.

It was an email from one of John Pirona's relatives in March this year who put into words why that reporting has been essential.

Pirona's aunt said she often thought back to an introductory philosophy lesson in the early 1970s, when a lecturer posed the classic question: "If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear, does it make a sound?"

"At 17, I just didn't get it," Pirona's aunt wrote.

"But I now know exactly what it means."

John Pirona's suicide was and is a tragic event for his family, just as the suicide deaths of countless other victims of child sexual abuse have been tragic events for their families. But those tragic events have been experienced in silence.

The decision of Pirona's family to speak out when the Herald approached them a year ago meant the community was "around to hear it". As the Pirona family waited those five awful days, the community also waited. The photo of a smiling John Pirona that appeared on the Herald's front page on July 26 last year made the tragedy of historic child sex abuse real.

The "sound" of that metaphorical tree falling, when police found Pirona's body on July 27 last year, meant it was not only heard, but led to a much louder sound in response - the cry of a community saying "enough".

The Royal Commission "is a fitting tribute to our lost and abused boys", Pirona's aunt wrote.

For the past week the NSW Commission of Inquiry sitting in Newcastle Supreme Court has heard evidence from Catholic clergy. Those clergy members have been in their 70s.

Some Catholic Church representatives in their 80s have been charged in recent months with child sex offences dating back to the 1960s and 1970s.

More than one person has expressed concern to me about the age of the men being questioned in the witness box, or by police, about events decades ago. To those people I've made the following points.

Many of the victims of historic child sex abuse in the Hunter are also elderly. I have spoken to victims in their 70s. Sitting in the public gallery in the past few weeks have been parents of victims. One is in the late 80s. Those victims and their parents have waited decades for justice.

On the morning of the second day of the Special Commission of Inquiry, on May 7, I opened an email from a Hunter woman. A male relative of hers, a father, had committed suicide six weeks earlier. Only a short time before his death he spoke for the first time about child sexual abuse at a Hunter Catholic school in the 1970s.

This weekend, and over the coming weeks, the family of John Pirona, his friends, his NSW Fire and Rescue colleagues, and his former classmates and victims of the notorious Hunter paedophile priest, will remember a man who was much loved, and is sorely missed.

His two young daughters, Siennah and Lateisha, will live their lives without him.

The crimes may have occurred decades ago, but the consequences are as fresh as today.