FORMER St Ambrose pupil David Nolan — a victim of Alan Morris — gives his reaction to the inquiry and what it means for some of the victims and their families

I went to a funeral a while ago of a man who gave evidence against Alan Morris in the trial that saw my ex-teacher jailed for nine years.

At the service, his sister stood up and told the congregation: "I believe that it was the experiences he suffered at school that killed my brother."

He, like many others, had turned to drink to try to block out what had happened to him at the hands of Alan Morris. He never got over it.

The effects of Morris’s abuse — dished out in a tiny, windowless space known as The Dark Room — continue to ripple across the decades.

Ex-pupils contact me with their stories all the time; some have never told another living soul about what happened to them at the school.

Although I feel honoured that they would contact me, I sometimes dread seeing an email from someone whose name I don’t recognise, with the subject heading ‘St Ambrose’, because the contents of those emails never fails to break my heart.

I’m also contacted by parents — many now in their 70s and 80s — who are still wracked with guilt.

Why didn’t we realise what was going on? What more could we have done? Why didn’t we spot the signs?

I feel so sorry for them.

Pupils and parents who have been so terribly damaged by what happened at the school deserve answers, and I genuinely hoped that the report into what happened at St Ambrose would provide them with some comfort. It didn’t even come close.

The Alan Morris case was the biggest historic sex abuse investigation ever mounted by Greater Manchester Police.

Detectives described what he did over nearly 20 years as ‘abuse on an industrial scale’.

Yet no one at the school knew anything? No one tried to stop him? No one helped those boys?

Shame on them.

If they didn’t spot what was going on under their very noses, then they were really not up to the job of teaching and caring for children in the first place.

I helped the investigators compile the report into what happened by agreeing to be interviewed — most pupils didn’t want to have anything to do with it — but so many areas of vital importance were still left untouched in the summary that I have now seen.

A summary that was delivered in June, 2016, yet has sat in someone’s desk drawer since then.

Why is there no mention of multiple claims of abuse carried out by other teachers and Christian Brothers?

What checks were made into Alan Morris’s past before he was allowed to go from St Ambrose to the Holy Angels, the church next door to the school?

He was allowed to come and go as he pleased, not to mention supervise youngsters on the altar.

And, most of all, how and why was Morris allowed to continue his reign of terror for so long?

The people are not the only ones disappointed by the review.

Former Detective Constable Nicola Graham, who was the deputy detective in the case, told me: ‘This was one of the hardest cases I’ve ever investigated.

Dealing with more than 40 adult male victims who hadn’t felt able to come forward as children was very difficult. The review is lacking in detail. It doesn’t fully explain how the investigator reached the conclusion they did. It also appears that a lack of record keeping at the school also hindered the investigator.’

One conclusion in the report did genuinely stun me.

That when the scandal first broke, the school seemed more concerned with Alan Morris’s welfare and the reputation of St Ambrose itself, than the victims.

That’s shocking — and has led to considerable and understandable resentment from those involved in the case.

Many of the victims that I watched give evidence in court have been shattered by what has happened.

What’s more, I believe there have been at least nine suicides related to events at St Ambrose College over the years.

It angers me when people say, ‘it’s all in the past, why dig it up?’

It wasn’t in the past for those men on the day they took their own lives. It was with them every day since it first happened.

We had hoped that the report would bring this whole sorry tale to an end. It hasn’t.

So what now? What do the victims want?

They want lessons — real lessons — to be learned from this. And for it to never happen again.

Doesn’t everyone?