2 weeks Ago By Rachel Connolly
I had been keeping an eye on this case because the school involved, known as Methody, is also my former school. I was never a rugby player but I assume the idea behind such a venture is not simply to play together in different weather, but also that it fosters team building and a sense of camaraderie and community. I imagine a trip like this is supposed to be fun.
A bit of a treat for boys who have trained together on cold, wet early mornings and sacrificed their evenings and weekends. Instead McConkey’s allegations describe his experience of “hostile”, juvenile macho bullying and his own feeling of helplessness. McConkey claims that older pupils forced him and other boys to run naked around the resort they were staying in and videoed them.
He says they then used this video to coerce him into having his head shaved. And that he was forced to witness other boys as they were coerced into performing an act on a sex toy. Essentially he describes a group of slightly older boys humiliating a group of slightly younger ones.
The school has admitted liability in relation to negligence and a failure to supervise the boys. His mother, Sian Mawhinney, told the BBC: “Gabriel came back from this trip a totally different child than the one that we sent away and I think no mother expects these events to take place on a school trip.” McConkey said : “Grammar school rugby culture has to be exposed and must change.
” He seems to be an admirably brave and freethinking person. I couldn’t agree with his statement more. The details of his story disgusted but didn’t surprise me.
It reminded me of the way the school rugby world worked back when I was there. There was a culture of excessive permissiveness over the bad behaviour of certain rugby stars, which in turn fostered entitlement and even worse behaviour. This was not the case only at my school, as I remember it, but throughout the rugby-playing grammar schools.
The rest of us were second-class citizens by comparison. If the purpose of this permissiveness was to make the life of a rugby boy a gilded existence, then McConkey has shown it does not even do that. Still, while the details struck me as familiar, when I heard about McConkey’s case I did find myself thinking: really? Has nothing changed? I had assumed the world of school rugby had a moment of reckoning, back in 2018 with the notorious “rugby rape trial”.
In that trial a group of young men (Stuart Olding, Paddy Jackson, Blane McIlroy) were charged variously with sexual offences and another, Rory Harrison, with concealing evidence, after a young woman reported them to police. Jackson and Olding were found not guilty of rape. McIlroy was acquitted of exposure and Harrison, who was charged with perverting the course of justice and withholding information, was also found not guilty.
But the evidence shown at the trial caused widespread outrage . Three of those four men had been rugby players at Methody when they were teenagers. The woman’s bloodied thong was passed to the jury for examination.
Lewd texts from rugby group chats were published. “Any sluts get f**ked?” an unidentified person asked Olding in one. Olding boasted: “There was a bit of spit-roasting going on last night fellas.
” Jackson said: “There was a lot of spit roast last night.” Olding said: “It was like a merry-go-round at a carnival.” I thought all this would have served as enough of an embarrassment for a major cultural shift.
Really, it should have. And even in the absence of a major cultural shift, it seems mad to me that a few years on from this trial, a group of rugby boys were taken on a school trip and left unsupervised to the extent some were forced to run around naked and perform sex acts on toys. It was courageous and selfless of McConkey to come forward about his experience.
I am glad he has been paid this settlement in recognition of what he went through. But the money will not cancel out his traumatic experience, or make up for what his mother describes as “a horrendous two-year ordeal” since. In the time since I was at school we have seen the global #Metoo movement play out.
There has been endless discourse about the harms of sexual violence. “Toxic masculinity” is so overused as a phrase it has become a sort of meme. The rest of the world has moved on.
Yet this culture still lives on in some corners of schools rugby. My school was (and I assume still is) an excellent school in many ways. I made friends there whom I will have for my entire life.
I had lots of brilliant and dedicated teachers to whom I owe a great deal. But I can’t help but feel their good work is undermined by a culture like this. Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast.
Her first novel Lazy City was published last year.
