March 2021 Child sex abuser attempted to take case for unfair dismissal This is the face of the school caretaker who had the gall to sue his former bosses for unfair dismissal after they found out he was molesting boys at the school. Bernard Browne (62) was this week locked up for nine years for the sexual abuse of three boys from the CBS school on North Richmond Street, in Dublin city centre. Gardaí began investigating Browne for the first time in 1993. At that stage school authorities acted promptly and confronted him. Browne used the promise of small amounts of cash to entice the boys into situations where he would sexually molest them. He would ejaculate while rubbing himself naked against them and convinced some of the children that he was only doing this to collect his sperm and donate it to childless couples. Browne resigned from the school but the brass-necked child abuser later tried to claim the school had forced him to resign. He even went as far as taking an unfair dismissal case against the school board but he quickly dropped the case when he realised Garda investigators were sitting in on the public hearings. In the 1993 cases, the DPP directed no prosecutions but in 2017 gardaí received information about another victim from the child abuse charity One-In-Four. This week a source close to the investigation said that the three victims had been fearful about coming forward. “Either they thought he was dead or their story wouldn’t be believed,” our source said. After finally finding the strength to tell his One-In-Four counsellor about the abuse, one of the victims then went to gardaí. During the investigation that followed detectives spoke to the two other men. Those investigations, which involved painstaking trawling of historical school records, resulted in the caging of Browne on Thursday. The victims told gardaí how Browne used the promise of extra pocket money to lure them into his janitor’s shed where he would fondle them for his own sexual kicks. The boys were aged between 11 and 16 and Browne would molest them on a weekly basis. The twisted paedophile also tricked the terrified victims into going back to his flat on Belvedere Place in Dublin city centre where he would force himself onto them. The sicko convinced the boys that he was simply trying to make some extra cash by selling his sperm to a sperm bank. He told one victim that he was collecting his sperm to help childless couples who wanted to have kids. Last October, as he was about to go on trial, Browne pleaded guilty to nine counts of indecently assaulting three boys on dates between 1983 and 1990. The nine counts are samples charges from an indictment of 44 charges. Browne, formerly of Brighton Road, Foxrock, Dublin, was aged between 25 and 28 when he began molesting the first victim, an 11-year-old boy. He had told the child he could earn some extra pocket money by helping him sweep and brought him to a shed at the back of the school where he molested him. This boy told the second victim that Browne needed boys to stimulate him so he could sell his sperm to a donor bank and he would get money for it. The two boys went to Browne’s flat and Browne lay each one down in turn on the floor, stripped them and rubbed himself against them until he climaxed. The court heard these attacks occurred on a weekly basis. Browne abused the third victim from 1987 to 1990 when the boy was aged 14 to 17. As an adult this victim told gardaí that he innocently believed Browne’s story that he was collecting his sperm to help couples who couldn’t have babies. He said he felt very scared during the abuse and didn’t know “what the hell was going on”. Browne threatened this boy not to tell anyone about the abuse or his family would be wiped out. Judge Elma Sheahan said the assaults caused the victims to turn to alcohol and drug abuse to bury their torment. She suspended the final year of a ten-year prison term on condition that Browne complete treatment programmes while in custody.