The first person to claim to have been sexually abused as a child resulting in dozens of disclosures from other alleged victims and a major police review has revealed his identity.

With his piercing brown eyes, Kevin Brown from Enniskillen (pictured above then and now), looks straight down our photographer’s lens. “I don’t need to hide anymore, I don’t need to feel guilty anywhere,” he says.

Back in March of this year, a nervous Kevin walked into the offices of The Impartial Reporter and asked to speak to a journalist to allege he had been abused by multiple men in Council-managed toilets more than 30 years ago. His story resulted in many more people feeling the confidence to make allegations of a similar nature.

On Tuesday night he waived his right to anonymity in an interview with BBC Spotlight in which he alleged once again that he was sexually abused by a network of men at Nugent’s Entry when he was 12. And he has returned to where it all began – this newspaper’s office.

“I’ve decided to come forward to reveal who I am because I don’t feel I should hide away anymore. Hiding away there is shame and guilt connected to that and I did hide away, I hid for a very long time.

“I now feel that I have a voice and I want to use it. I want to help others, I want to help those people who were abused in this town and feel they cannot speak up,” he said.

Kevin has said several of his friends were also abused as children in Enniskillen, claiming at least 10 of them later took their own lives.

“There have been deaths, there have been suicides, I am aware of people who took their own lives because of this, people who were close to me. I know at least 10 people who have died by suicide in Fermanagh because they were abused. The abuse happened in their childhood and all happened in Enniskillen,” he said.

Since he spoke to our reporter Jessica Campbell more than 70 people have been in touch to claim they too were abused by men and women across the county for decades.

Asked how he feels by the reaction to his story and what has happened since, Kevin replied: “I have felt troubled by it, I have felt sick, I have felt overwhelmed by the amount of people who came forward.

“I have no regret in coming forward, I wish I came forward 20 years earlier. Those men used to make me feel very fearful, I have felt scared. But today I feel empowered, that I’ve taken my power back.

“I don’t want to see the men who abused me walking the streets, I want to see them in prison. I’d like those men know the damage they have caused in my life, I also want them to know I will go as far as I can with this to make sure justice is served.

I know the truth; those men know the truth. I am not of the view that there was a network of men who abused children in Enniskillen, I know there was, absolutely,” he said.

In his powerful interview with this newspaper in March, Kevin recalled: “I was walking through the town one night and there used to be toilets in Nugent’s Entry and I went to use the toilet and I was sexually assaulted by a much older male who I knew to see, that’s all, I didn’t really know him,” he revealed.

“The assault happened in the toilet, in the cubicle and I came outside and I was actually physically sick on the floor. I wasn’t really sure what had just happened to me, I was 12 so I wasn’t really that aware of things.”

He went on to share that he was assaulted a second time, but by a different man from the first incident. He said: “The second incident I was walking home one night from my grandparents and on the way home there was a man in a telephone box and he followed me to the back alley of where I lived and he pulled me into a garden and sexually assaulted me.”

He added: “That was a very big thing to happen, it was a bit more intense than the previous thing.”

Kevin shared that the second man who assaulted him began to approach him on the street and “all sorts of places.”

He said: “Basically this man sort of pursued me and then started to offer me money and basically groomed me into having sex with him.” This was the beginning of a series of events which took place in the public toilets at Nugent’s Entry, the man explained.

“I would turn up and meet this man and he would give me money then he would ask me to meet him. Sometimes he wouldn’t be there but there would be someone else there and it just opened up this whole thing of all these different men being there,” he shared.

He explained that the encounters most often happened on a Sunday because that was the day that “the town used to be very quiet.”

He said: “In that alleyway there was nobody and those toilets were empty, only for those men, and I would turn up and then I started seeing other boys there that I would’ve been at school with.”

“I got into this thing of meeting these men, I don’t really know what happened but I was involved in this ring really,” he added.

Kevin believes that information about him and other boys was shared between the men involved in the ring.

He said: “One of them once stopped me on the way to school and started asking me questions and invited me out to his house and named all these other boys that went to his house, so I know that those other boys were abused by that particular person.”