Sir, – If one were to rely on the Irish media, one would think that the religious orders, and particularly the Christian Brothers, were the only people to use corporal punishment in Irish schools. While many of them did so, they were not by any means the only ones or possibly even the worst of those who did. One would also be ignorant of the huge contribution that Christian Brothers, in spite of their faults, made to Irish education.
From 1947 to 1953, I attended a national primary school in Co Tipperary, a small, rural two- room school with a schoolmaster and schoolmistress. The “discipline” in that school was characterised by brutal corporal punishment. The schoolmistress at times used the cane viciously; I saw little boys being slapped on the hands with the cane with such force that they urinated on the floor.
The violence was worse in the master’s classroom next door. As well as the vicious use of the cane, he had two other tricks up his sleeve. One was to come up to a student with both hands in his pockets and then quickly pull one hand out and slap the student hard across the face on one side and then straighten him up with a slap to the other side of the face from his other hand. I went home once with a swollen jaw from this treatment and my father came to the school to complain to the master. His second trick was to lift a child up by the ears and the skin under the ears and shake him.
On one occasion, he was doing this to a young boy and only stopped when the boy’s little sister from the infant class started to cry at what was happening to her brother (all school classes were in the one room that day due to the absence of the school mistress).
The effect of all of this on me was that I was terrified every morning going to school for a number of years, and I am sure that I was not the only one.
A reasonable question is who was responsible for this savagery. In the first instance the two teachers were responsible but I would also put a major responsibility on the then minister for education and the senior civil servant in the department. Neither can the school inspectors and the clerical manager of the school escape blame. They all must have known what was going on in schools.
There was a culture of corporal punishment, at times brutal, in schools, and I know from friends that this problem of savage use of the cane occurred in other lay teacher schools which they attended. I believe the problem was endemic in national schools.
However, please do not anybody pretend that this problem was unique to Catholic Ireland! Even to this day, school corporal punishment is legal in 19 of the 50 states of the United States.
I am happy to be able to balance my story of primary school cruelty to say not all lay primary teachers were cruel. In my last year in the school we were lucky to get a new schoolmaster who was a very good and humane teacher.
After primary school, I went to secondary school with the Patrician Brothers in Fethard, and two years later to the Christian Brothers in Clonmel. For me, the experience was like passing from darkness into light.
While corporal punishment was used in those secondary schools, it was used moderately, there was no atmosphere of fear and I mostly enjoyed my years in secondary school.
I would like to ask the question as to why the media ignores the endemic cruelty of national primary schools in the past and concentrates almost entirely on the religious orders.
I believe that this is because many in the media have an agenda to attack the Catholic Church and this necessitates ignoring other institutions guilty of cruelty to children.
The damage that this kind of narrow approach does is that it very much limits our understanding of how such cruelties came about about and thus reduces our ability to prevent them happening in the future.
It is also downright dishonest.
I received a superb secondary school education from both Christian Brothers and Patrician Brothers. This education stood to me during undergraduate studies at UCD and in postgraduate studies at Cornell University in the US.
I owe the Christian Brothers a huge debt of gratitude and I would like to thank the many Brothers who treated their students with dignity and did their best for them. I suspect many thousands of former students feel the same. Eaten bread is not always forgotten. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL T KANE,
DSc, MRIA
Emeritus Professor,
NUI Galway.