Beaten: The Irish childhoods ruined by corporal punishment

Dr Colum McCaffery (69) experienced his first beating when aged five. The woman also beat his friends.

“She had this thing that she had to establish herself. She’d have to beat the kids until they cried. She had this big white stick and if you didn’t hold out your hand to be beaten she’d beat you across the head.”

The woman was his “high babies” teacher at Golden Bridge national school in Inchicore, Dublin in 1954. He moved to St Michael’s national school, aged six, “and there the real madness started”.

“This Christian Brother, his idea of fun was to get the boys to fight one another – to punch and kick each other – for his amusement, and he’d batter you if you wouldn’t do it. The dusters started to be thrown, banging off heads. It was bedlam, mad. It was the first time I came across an adult who was out of control.”

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The Brothers much preferred beating the s**t out of the poor kids

His second class teacher, though “terrifying”, didn’t hit them. His third and fourth-class teacher, however, “was to my mind really, really bad”.

“He beat the sh*t out of people, severely – punching, kicking, for failing at lessons. There were kids wetting themselves.”

Colum, like hundreds of thousands of other children until the mid-1990s when corporal punishment was criminalised, experienced teachers’ use of physical force at school.

Today, the practice is regarded by many as having been “of its time”, a fact of children’s lives – in Ireland and elsewhere – but a growing number of people are questioning whether the “punishment” that was meted out in day national and secondary schools would be better described as “abuse”.

The rules

Corporal punishment was first legally recognised in the 1908 Children’s Act, which said teachers had the right to punish a child if they were old enough to appreciate the measure. The punishment had to be moderate and reasonable and the implement used “fit for purpose”.

Rules issued in 1933 by the Department of Education to all national and industrial schools authorised physical punishment in the case of misconduct by use of the cane, strap or birch, but not the leather strap, and advocated caution.

The 1946 Rules and Regulations for National Schools said corporal punishment “should be administered only for grave transgressions and in no circumstances for mere failure at school lessons”. It should be “confined to the form usually employed in schools, viz slapping on the open palm with a light cane or strap. The boxing of children’s ears, the pulling of their hair or similar ill-treatment is absolutely forbidden and will be visited with severe penalties,” said the rules.

“No teacher should carry about a cane or other instrument of punishment. Frequent recourse to corporal punishment will be considered by the Minister as indicating bad tone and ineffective discipline. Any other form of corporal punishment which tends to humiliate a child or expose the child to ridicule before the other children is also forbidden.”

In 1956, the use of a leather strap was explicitly permitted.

The brush handle

St Michael’s national school, where Dr McCaffery, went is now closed. It was in Keogh Square, a maze of tenement houses later cleared for the construction of St Michael’s Estate flats, which were demolished in 2013. Residents here were known as “barrackers” as it was on the site of the old Richmond Barracks.

“There was appalling poverty in Keogh Square. We were reared in Connolly Avenue – corporation housing just back from the square. To an extent we were covered by the ‘barrackers’ [from the poorer streets]. The Brothers much preferred beating the s**t out of the poor kids.”

The violence continued into secondary school, says McCaffery, and included punching and kicking. “When I was 14, there was one teacher who came in one day with a sweeping brush handle. He started beating all over the place. There were boys lying on the floor, trying to protect themselves.

“I went home and told my dad, ‘I’m not going back. I can’t.’ He asked me what had happened, and I told him. He said he wanted me to go back, but he would write a letter to bring back with me. That teacher was never seen at the school again.”

“What you did was say, ‘It’ll be alright if I keep my head down.’ You were afraid going in. You had to have a strategy, stay in the crowd.”

The beating stopped, he says, “after Inter Cert”.

‘Yes, I’m angry’

Corporal punishment was finally abolished in 1982, when the department issued a new rule: “The use of corporal punishment is forbidden. Any teacher who contravenes . . . this rule will be regarded as guilty of conduct unbefitting a teacher and will be subject to severe disciplinary action.”

However, corporal punishment was not outlawed until 1997, when it came under the aegis of the Offences Against the Person Act.

Dr McCaffery had been reluctant to speak before now about his childhood experiences. “In the 1990s really heavy stuff started to emerge, about children being raped and beaten within an inch of their lives. What we [went through] pales [in comparison with that] – to say anything seemed ridiculous. But now that these things are beginning to be pushed through, it’s time to talk about what these teachers in the schools did – day in, day out under the pretence that life was like that at the time. It wasn’t.

“I feel like my childhood was stolen. I came from a really loving family, a good area . . . But there wouldn’t be day I don’t think of the violence at school . . . When someone basically f**ks up your childhood, a childhood that would have been idyllic – yes, I’m angry.”

School was about surviving it, getting out. I associated education with punishment

Norman Croke (70) grew up on Meade’s Terrace, behind Holles Street in Dublin – the third youngest of 12 children reared by their mother. Their father was working in England. He attended the now closed St Andrew’s national school on Pearse Street.

“My only recall of the years I spent there was violence. From day one, if you couldn’t answer a question it was beating. By and large your entire span of time within school was about avoiding eye contact, looking for invisibility.

“We had the same teacher the whole way through from age six. He had a leather strap he’d had specially made, with two layers of coins sewn into it. First thing in the morning was, ‘Did you do your ecker [slang for homework]?’ and if you didn’t it was ‘hands out’ to be slapped. He’d slap your hand, the tip of the leather hitting your wrist so hard it would be shining red, pulsing.

“A day wouldn’t go by that you wouldn’t be hit. The reality was you were in such white terror you’d learn nothing. I hated school.

“School was about surviving it, getting out. I associated education with punishment and I remember, age 12, sitting in class and saying to myself: ‘No one will dictate my life’.”

At age 13, he “ran out of the school” and got a job as a messenger boy. He borrowed books from the library and “self-educated” later, doing a degree through the Open University and holding senior roles in the trade-union Siptu. Now retired, he is an independent wedding and funeral celebrant.

The only way of avoiding the “endemic violence”, he says, was to “mitch” – take the day off. But many of those who did were brought before the courts – with their parents – where “someone was deciding whether you went to Daingean or Artane [industrial schools].

“Corporal punishment was abuse that none of us, or our parents, had any say in. The State decided you must go to school. The State failed to protect you from violence at school. If you didn’t go to school the State sent you to a reformatory school where you were beaten. There was no escape.”

‘He sang as he hit us’

Of those – eight men and two women – who spoke to The Irish Times in recent weeks for this article, five are men in their 60s. Two younger men experienced abuse in the 1970s and 1980s.

One, Dave, suffered “daily physical violence” in a national school in Dublin between 1975 and 1982, while another, Fergal, was in Wexford in the 1980s.

Dave’s first memory of first class was witnessing “in horror” as the teacher picked up another seven-year-old by his ears for getting a maths question wrong.

“Unfortunately, his heavy wooden desk got caught in his feet so the teacher ended up lifting both him and the desk off the ground while shouting in his face.

“Two years later, the same teacher was covering for mine who was sick. He saw me at the back of the class lying on my desk with my head in my hands – I had flu. He took this as a sign of disrespect, marched down to where I was sitting and pulled me out of my chair by my hair and threw me out the door.”

Dave’s third class teacher “seemed to enjoy the beatings he dished out. He used to smile and sing a jovial song as he hit us. He used half of one of those giant wooden protractors to hit us on the hands if we couldn’t recite our Irish poetry, forgot homework or if we got our spellings wrong.”

His fourth class teacher “beat us with a severed rubber Hoover ring – his ‘rubber jelly’ he called it”.

“Angela”, now 63, attended a Sisters of Mercy convent school in the southeast of the country, where a nun teaching domestic science used to punch her hard in the back of her head with her Bride of Christ ring and shout “You stupid” at her every class.

She suffered abuse in national school too and recalls witnessing severe beatings with a thick “bata” – Irish for “stick” – in senior infants.

Angela left school aged 15. “I did feel I was losing my education but I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

‘I fell to the floor’

Prof Pat Dolan (60) chair of the Unesco Child and Family Research Centre at NUI Galway, who is developing a programme of “empathy education” for schools, believes what was known as “corporal punishment” is – in the manner in which it was inflicted – the “last form of the mass institutional abuse of children” that has yet to be acknowledged by its perpetrators or the State.

“It has to be confronted for the huge harm it did to children’s education, mental health and to those children, now as adults”.

He left his Christian Brothers school in Stoneybatter, Dublin, “before my Leaving Certificate – just to get away from it”.

From age seven, Dolan experienced “being beaten on a daily basis . . . They’d pull you by your hair, bang your head on the table.”

Aged 12, he had a teacher who would chase children around the class as he beat them with a leather strap. “You’d be crying. What could you do but look away in horror? It was not just experiencing the violence directly, but being forced to witness it that was so abusive.”

In another incident, in first year, he defended a boy with a bad stammer whom the teacher was mocking. “This teacher went into a rage and beat the s**t out of me in front of the class – punches, vicious kicks, thumps. I fell to the floor a few times.”

“An apology from [Minister for Education] Richard Bruton on behalf of the State for what happened to us as kids is vital now if we are to move on from this brutal phase in Irish education.”

Corporal punishment may not have been illegal but its widespread excessive use breached the clear rules of the department that paid teachers’ wages, argues Dolan.

Though schools were run independently of the department, almost exclusively by religious, department inspectors visited schools regularly to ensure they were being run properly.

The 2009 Ryan report on child abuse quotes the Christian Brothers arguing that corporal punishment should be viewed in context and “was permissible and widespread in schools and homes at the relevant time”.

People knew this was going on, knew it was abuse and some were brave enough to speak out about it

There were many at the time, however, who did see the widespread excessive use of corporal punishment as wrong.

In the 1950s, senator Owen Sheehy-Skeffington proposed legislation to end corporal punishment for girls and in 1956 and 1957 fought against amendments allowing for the use of leather straps. Dr Noel Browne, TD, in June 1957 described permitting “the barbarity of the use of the strap and of an adult beating a child with a strap” as “an unthinkable attitude”.

A letter to this newspaper, published April 19th, 1963, and signed “Catholic parent”, protested about the “illegal strap still ‘flourishing’ openly and defiantly in so many of our schools”.

In 1969, the News of The World ran a three-part series, "Under the Lash", about cruelty in British and Irish schools. Part one was a two-page feature on beatings allegedly being inflicted at the De La Salle national school in Navan, Co Meath, highlighting the concerns of local GP, Dr Paddy Randles who was regularly treating the injuries boys suffered at the hands of the teachers.

“People knew this was going on, knew it was abuse and some were brave enough to speak out about it,” says Dolan.

All of those who spoke to The Irish Times describe their profound fear of school as children, the terror and horror of being beaten and witnessing class-mates being beaten.

Angela attributes later mental-health problems and the breakdown of her marriage to the abuse she suffered. Croke describes his anger that, in his view, as working-class children: “We were being subdued to be disciplined to go into a labouring environment.”

Long-term impact

Hilary Somerville, a counsellor who works with adult survivors of abuse, sees clients processing the “shocking” impact of violence experienced as children in school.

“It definitely has a long-term impact. That can be deep anger, leading to aggression, physical violence, an inability to deal with conflict. Or it can go the other way, and the person can be passive, passive aggressive, a deep fear of conflict.”

Asked her view on the argument it did no harm to children, she says: “I would totally disagree with that. Of course it does harm. How could it not? What does it say about an adult-child relationship that the adult would use violence? The child has no power.

“I have just had a client, in her 50s, who went to an inner-city school in Dublin. As a little girl she was kicked. Kicked across desks. It’s shocking.”

In a statement the Christian Brothers said: “Our view on the harshness meted out in schools, including former Christian Brothers schools, is that such behaviour was abhorrent, had no place in a civilised society and is a matter of deep regret.”

The Sisters of Mercy said: “We will deal directly with the official authorities on any such matter.”

‘Societal norms’

The Irish Times asked the Department of Education whether it regarded what happened in many day schools before 1982 and 1997 as abuse, whether it had had any complaints about excessive "corporal punishment" and whether any teacher had ever been sanctioned for abuse.

In a lengthy statement it said corporal punishment should be viewed “with regard to societal norms and values” adding “Ireland’s attitude towards children and childhood, generally, has advanced enormously over the past three decades.

“The constitutional and legal position in respect of day schools is that the State provides for education, which takes place in a system of schools which operates under the aegis of private entities. School patrons and managers are responsible for the day-to-day running of schools and for the observance of the various rules set down by the Department of Education. Those rules existed in a non-statutory basis until the passing by the Oireachtas of the Education Act 1998.

“It should also be recalled that in 1999, the then taoiseach made an general apology on behalf of the State to all those who had suffered child abuse.”

“There are records of historic complaints against teachers contained in departmental files, including those which have transferred to the National Archives. Such complaints cover a variety of issues including complaints about corporal punishment.”

Prof Dolan describes the department statement as “arrogant and disrespectful” to those who suffered violence in day schools.

“The department seems to assume corporal punishment was administered professionally and is trying to acknowledge it and defend it. Either it was abuse or it wasn’t, and it needs now to be named and faced up to by the State as the abuse it was.”