He had taken the statements with him in his briefcase.

He didn’t want to keep them at the school.

35

If those statements still existed, we would all, perhaps, know a great deal more about why Conor died. But Pat Kilroy destroyed them on the day the three boys were arrested. He fed them to the fire in the living room of his house on Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock. He has never explained why he thought this necessary.

There are several theories. One: the statements incriminated the boys to a degree that Kilroy found disturbing. Two: the story told by the statements contained one or more aspects that the gardaí already knew to be untrue, and Pat Kilroy destroyed the documents to save the boys from being charged with obstruction of justice. Three: the burden of responsibility entailed by possession of the statements became too much for Pat Kilroy to bear. Four: the statements in themselves were insufficient to exonerate the boys, and Kilroy believed that they would simply contribute to their eventual undoing. Five: Pat Kilroy wanted to avoid causing undue pain to the boys’ parents – and to Eileen and Brendan Harris.

There is a sixth theory. It is possible that the statements portrayed the lives and behaviour of Brookfield graduates in a way that Pat Kilroy found unacceptable, and he destroyed them for this reason alone.

An opinion-piece published in a reputable broadsheet had the following to say about Pat Kilroy and the missing statements:

It’s not often you get to catch the old boys’ network in a rearguard action, trying desperately to defend three of its own. But that’s what these statements essentially were, whatever they may have contained. This was one public schoolboy buying insurance for three more public schoolboys. Did Pat Kilroy keep those signed confessions in a big brown envelope? He might as well have. Brown envelopes have always been how you got ahead in the Republic. Just don’t try it if you grew up in Darndale. That’s what we’ve got in this country: one law for the rich and another for the poor.

This article expressed a sentiment that was shared by many people. Of course, the matter of the secret statements was just one tiny aspect of what people viewed as a larger failure of justice: the cancelled trial that, eventually, allowed Richard to go free. But it was seized on, nonetheless, as one more sign that the country’s rulers were not prepared to sacrifice ‘three of their own’, even for so grave a crime as murder.

I don’t question the validity of this argument. But I think Pat Kilroy’s motivations, when he helped the boys compose their statements and offered to keep them hidden in the Brookfield safe, derived from a more complex source than the demands of class loyalty or the need to protect the reputation of the school. If it was a ‘rearguard action’, it was one spurred by a sense of the humane. The statements were a rope thrown to three drowning men. Perhaps Pat Kilroy destroyed the documents because he realized that this rope would not be enough to save them.