The glacial process of Ireland confronting the self-inflicted traumas of the 20th century takes another slow, lurching move forward with Leathered (RTÉ One, Wednesday), a distressing chronicling of the industrial levels of violence at schools in Ireland before the prohibition of corporal punishment in 1982.
Such wickedness and depravity should have been confronted decades ago, but, as ever in Ireland, the reckoning with the past proceeds fitfully, reluctantly and often with, at best, a grudging acknowledgment by the perpetrators of the harm caused. In the wake of similarly distressing exposés about sexual abuse by religious orders and the evils of the mother-and-baby homes, Leathered provides the (overwhelmingly male) victims of corporal punishment with a long-overdue forum in which to make their voices heard.
What they have to say is, of course, upsetting. In Cork, the poet and author Theo Dorgan and Mick Hannigan, who was for many years in charge of the city’s film festival, talk about the abuse they experienced and witnessed at the North Monastery boys’ school. Hannigan describes seeing a Christian Brother land a blow to the side of Dorgan’s face that sent him sprawling. “It’s predator on prey,” Hannigan says. “You looked at a teacher the wrong way and you got a slap.”
This was in the 1960s. My father was at the Mon at the same time, and he would tell me about a brother who would beat students with a hurley. He was himself on the receiving end of such violence – he also remembered watching the brother beat another student, again with the hurley, to the point where the victim almost lost consciousness. He recalled this not as a one-off incident but as part of the everyday horrors of the North Mon at that time.
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The boys who went to the Mon were from urban working-class backgrounds, but the violence at schools was across the social spectrum. In Navan, Gerry Coffey recollects beating at the hands of an abusive lay teacher. “I remember it very clearly. I can remember where he was standing before the incident was happening. I remember the colour of his hair. I remember his glasses falling off in the middle of the beating. That’s how deep it was imprinted in my head,” he says.
He started drinking in his early teens – it numbed the pain, taking him out of his head and far away from Navan. He went to London, where he was homeless for a while and later had “a complete mental breakdown”.
Leathered is grim viewing, an unflinching indictment of Irish society – the secrets kept, the glances averted, the moral cowardice percolating through the collective psyche. People did speak out, though to little avail, as we learn from Dr Mary Randles, who with her husband, Dr Paddy Randles, protested about the abuse in Navan.
No Irish newspaper would listen to them. But when the British News of the World reported on the abuse, locals were angry not at the teachers but at the whistleblowers, for having portrayed the town in a negative light. (The Randles’ practice lost half its patients overnight.) Times have changed, but in Navan’s angry refusal to cause a fuss or take a stand, we can perhaps see reflections of the country we live in today.
If Leathered has a flaw, it is perhaps that it takes on too much in a single episode. There are so many victims, and each of their stories is so upsetting, that after a while anger gives way to numbness. In its final 20 minutes the documentary touches on the culpability of the State, the stonewalling by religious institutions and the question of whether victims of physical abuse should be part of the process to compensate those who suffered sexual abuse at schools. But this element of the story needs more space. Would it have been feasible to give two nights to the subject, with the second part dedicated to the attempts today to achieve justice?
Leathered finishes with Dorgan recalling an incident at a pub on Patrick Street in Cork. In the corner, he saw another victim of abuse at the North Mon. “He had already embarked on a life as a career alcoholic,” Dorgan says. He recalls the man chiding him for speaking out. “You’re always giving out about the Christian Brothers,” the classmate says before pausing to drain his glass. “They never did me any harm.”
