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The Central Criminal Court infomatique via Flickr

'Why wasn't he stopped?' asks abuse victim of school caretaker

Derek Mulligan has demanded answers from the Donegal school where he was molested by employee Michael Ferry.

ONE OF THE victims of Donegal school caretaker Michael Ferry has demanded answers over his horrific ordeal.

Mr Ferry was yesterday sentenced to 18 years for molesting and raping four boys between ten and 17 years old at Ard Scoil Mhuire in Derrybeg, Co Donegal between 1990 and 2005. Justice Paul Carney told the Central Criminal Court that the 55-year-old had remained working in the school despite being convicted of sexual assault in 2002.

Derek Mulligan, 24, yesterday waived his right to anonymity as one of Mr Ferry’s victims. He spoke out publicly today, asking: “Why was he still allowed to be in that school when they knew what he was capable of? Why did they not stop it? Is there more to the story than what’s there?”

In an emotional interview on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, he urged other abuse victims to speak out. He said coming forward was “the best thing that ever happened to me. Because if you don’t talk about it, it’s in your own head. And it’ll take over.

I can’t take it any more. I want people to see that they’re not on they’re own. To make a stand. Because it can ruin one’s life. And I’ve been through everything, I don’t think it can hurt any more than what it’s already hurt.

Mr Mulligan also spoke about being groomed by Mr Ferry, who the court heard yesterday would give his victims alcohol and cigarettes and make them watch pornography. “I was just a kid kicking a football around,” Mr Mulligan said. “A vulnerable child, but thinking I was clever.

You don’t see him grooming you until it’s too late. You don’t see it coming. And then you question yourself – why did I let this happen to me? You become ashamed of yourself.

Minister for Justice Alan Shatter today called on the school managers to explain Michael Ferry’s employment. “It is unacceptable that this individual having being reportedly convicted for child abuse of a student nine years earlier continued to be employed as a caretaker,” he said.

Read more: Convicted sex offender returned to school job to abuse again >

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4 Comments
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    Mute Eamon Harbison
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    Aug 11th 2011, 10:37 PM

    Seems to me that Amazon has no one to blame but itself if its data center lost power…. They should have had ample UPS to bridge the utility power loss and the time their N+1 generators kick in. Also, they should have diesel tanks onsite to store at least 72hours worth to run the center on full load, and a local supplier on contract to re-fill the tanks after 24 hours. If Amazon do not have any these redundancy measures in place, I would be very surprised… If they do and they still had power loss that affected their customers services, then they need to look internally for where to point the finger of blame!

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    Mute Christopher Duffin
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    Aug 12th 2011, 9:47 AM

    Not to mention their own software hampering restoration of the downed instances and a complete lack of help from their support in trying to restore things. This has been a joke from the beginning.

    I also cannot understand why they only had power from one sub station supplying the DC. Any data centre I’ve been involved with has had power coming from at least 2 sub stations to avoid these issues.

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    Mute John Jacob
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    Aug 11th 2011, 11:15 PM

    who gives a crap really ?!?!

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    Mute Darren O'Brien
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    Aug 12th 2011, 2:42 AM

    I give a crap. Our company had a good chunk of our infrastructure down
    for 2 days because of this. Im an Irish system administrator working in Spain and this was embarrassing to say the least. We chose Amazon for its reliability and really cutting edge cloud services. The fact that its in Ireland was a bonus and made me proud that one of the best cloud facilities in Europe, if not the world, is in my home country. But we’re going to think hard about continuing with Amazon as I’m sure many others will. It’s a pity but when your company’s existence depends on servers staying on, and even minutes of downtime cost thousands in revenue and incalculable loss of reputation, you’ve got to go where you’ll be sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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    Mute Damian Keane
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    Aug 12th 2011, 12:30 AM

    People who think that Ireland could make some sorely needed money by being a reliable cloud computing bridgehead for Europe.

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    Mute fitszpatrick
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    Aug 12th 2011, 3:47 AM

    Loss of power is a serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of children on the brink of death by starvation with no back up systems. This is going to have a detrimental effect on their profitability.

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    Mute Jane Bresnan
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    Aug 12th 2011, 8:04 AM

    Maybe there was a lack of surge protection? 48 hours is a long time for a data center to be down. There must have been equipment damage. All data centers will have bought at least two independant feeds from the esb as well, were the esb supplying both from the same substation?

    It is very embarrassing for this to happen. Ireland has been trying to market itself as an ideal data center location because of the lack of extreme weather conditions, distance from earthquake zones and political stability. Top class electrical infrastructure is part of that marketing speil.

    We do not want to lose the investment and employment brought by these corporates.

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