December 2006 Trainee priest fondled schoolboy A trainee priest who sexually assaulted a schoolboy has been placed on probation for two years and ordered to carry out 200 hours’ community service. Daniel McManus, 21, was a volunteer with St Andrew’s Ambulance and groped the boy during treatment for a leg injury he sustained playing sport. At Glasgow Sheriff Court, he admitted the sex attack on 10 December. He was placed on the sex offenders’ register for two years and banned from working with children. The court heard there had been an element of grooming in the offence and that a psychiatrist deemed the 21-year-old at moderate risk of reoffending. Sheriff Nigel Ross said prison would not address McManus’s underlying issues. The court was told the boy was unable to play rugby due to a leg injury and was offered treatment. It was there that he met McManus, who was working as a St Andrew’s Ambulance first-aider. Iain Bradley, prosecuting, said the youngster was asked to take off his trousers and pants, which left him exposed and “feeling strange”. ‘His vocation’ McManus applied an ice-pack and bandage onto his leg and it was during this that he fondled the schoolboy. He was quizzed by police and he admitted touching the boy inappropriately. He had been training to be a priest at the time and his lawyer said he had resigned from both the college he had been at and the St Andrew’s Ambulance Service. Susan Burns, defending, said: “It had been his vocation to become a priest and he had spent four years training for that. “However, such an allegation was detrimental to himself and the faith that he had committed his life to.