For David Ryan, Monday February 2nd, 2026, will live long in his memory. “What an experience. I’ll never forget it, never, never forget it,” he said.
It was the day a pope apologised to him personally for the abuse he, his late brother Mark and their friend Aidan Moore suffered as children at the Spiritan-run Blackrock College in Dublin and its preparatory school Willow Park. He had also told the pope about the abuse he suffered as a child at the Jesuit-run St Declan’s school on Dublin’s Northumberland Road.
“I told him that it took me 40 years to realise it wasn’t my fault, it was their fault,” he said.
He felt the pope’s “sympathy, his empathy for survivors, for myself and for my family and my close friends. He felt it and he was sorry.”
Ryan was the first Irish abuse survivor to meet Pope Leo XIV and, accompanied by a photograph of Mark (62), who died suddenly in September 2023, he told of what the abuse had done to all their families.
He was able to tell all of this in a private audience to the head of the Catholic Church. It was, he said afterwards, “an emotional but very powerful experience.”
Pope Leo had already listened to the RTÉ Radio 1 documentary Blackrock Boys, broadcast in November 2022, and read its transcript. It told the story of the abuse David and Mark Ryan suffered at the secondary school and Willow Park, which prompted a flood of further allegations from other men who had also suffered at the two schools. These allegations were followed by hundreds more from men who attended other schools across Ireland, many of them also religious-run.
David Ryan with a photograph of his late brother Mark before his meeting with Pope Leo. Photograph: Colm Flynn
Ryan presented Pope Leo with six questions he wanted answers to but did not feel it appropriate to say what those questions were, just yet. Last week he said these would be “tough questions” about how “the Catholic Church had pushed the abuse issue under the carpet for so long.” However, on Monday he asked the pope: “Why are these priests still doing it?” (abusing people and covering it up).
Before the audience with the pope he was very nervous. “I was bricking it.” Then “I told him how I lived and worked in Fethard, where he had been in 2005″, marking the 700th anniversary of the Augustinians, and soon “it was the same as I’m talking to you now.”
The pope “was so sorry to hear of my pain, for my family’s pain and for the other survivors that haven’t come forward yet”. What stood out was his “sincerity, his empathy”.
Ryan believed his brother Mark “would be so proud”. In 2022, after Blackrock Boys was broadcast, he said to his brother: “We should send it to the pope’. Mark said, ‘Are you mad?’ I said: ‘I am deadly serious. He has to hear about Blackrock and the Spiritans’.”
“It was left on the back burner, then Mark died.”
In 2024 he sent the programme to Pope Francis, who was arranging a meeting when he got sick and also died. So, when Leo had settled in after his election last May, Ryan contacted him. The rest was, well, Monday.
Deirdre Kenny of the One in Four support group joined the audience for “about 10 minutes”. Both were offered gifts of rosary beads which Leo blessed. As it was St Brigid’s weekend, Ryan presented the pope with a lapel pin of a St Brigid’s cross.
Later he met Irish Ambassador to the Holy See Frances Collins for “an informal chat” and on Wednesday he will meet new Minister for Education and Youth Hildegarde Naughton.