THE SYSTEM was so well developed that it had its own language. An electric jowler: a downwards blow on the face that felt like "getting an electric shock", writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
Dirty Hairy Sixpence: a name given to a man who put a sixpence in his trouser pocket and invited a boy to retrieve it.
Getting it on the bare: “What it meant was you would have to pull your nightshirt up, bend over and it would be a cane or the leather strap and you would get it heftily on the bottom.” Lámh láidir: the strong hand, as in “I was humane in my treatment but I also used the lámh láidir.”
Pay Night: Friday night, when the official beatings stored up throughout the week would be delivered.
On-the-spots: casual, unofficial assaults, engaged in whenever the perpetrator felt like it.
The black jack: the leather.
Freezing time: the punishment of being locked out overnight in winter.
Specials: boys who were being groomed for sexual abuse by Christian Brothers and were there- fore protected, to some extent, from the worst physical violence.
Badness: anything to do with sex. As one survivor explained, “They screamed about the dan- gers of badness and yet they were practising it on us.”
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THE SCALE OF THEorganised sadism inflicted on children by the Catholic Church and the State, and revealed in the report of the Commission on Child Abuse, is too large to take in. Between 1936 and 1970, 170,000 children were consigned to the 50 or so indus- trial schools. That is more than one child out of every 100 in the relevant age group.
Hubert Butler wrote of Drancy, the transit camp in Paris in which children were held before being sent off to Auschwitz, that the numbers involved froze the imagi- nation: “Their sufferings are too great and protracted to be imag- ined, and the range of human sym- pathy is narrowly restricted. Had four or five children only been killed or burned . . . we would have responded emotionally and their fate would have been carved on a marble tablet.” Had seven or 17 or even 70 children been enslaved and abused by church and State, we could weep for their fate. But 170,000 is too many and the things inflicted on them were too vile.
And so, the mind tries to focus on small images.
The little postscript on an anonymous note sent by an inmate from Artane industrial school to the Department of Edu- cation, describing his treatment as “unbearable”: “P.S. Do what you can, sir.”
The mix of ink, snots and blood. A Brother became enraged with the inability of a slow learner in Irish class to give the right answers: “He hit that lad and got his head and smashed it . . . on the bench. The ink wells went up, he was covered in ink, snots, blood, everything.”
The girl in Goldenbridge who taught herself to play a game with the letters on the crucifix while waiting her turn to be beaten on the landing: “There was a cross on the wall with INRI on the wall above the crucifix. I don’t know how I learned to do this, but I would look at INRI and make up words, so that I wasn’t there, so that I didn’t soak up what was going on . . .”
A child’s image of the man who was beating him: “He was like a wolf. His jaws literally went out and he bared his teeth . . .”
A boy in Letterfrack was given a broken cap gun as a present for Little Christmas. He pointed out that it was broken. The Brother gave him another present instead: “a black eye and swollen face”.
The boy leaving Tralee industrial school and asking two Brothers at the gate whether they knew where his mother was. “They ‘kind of sniggered’ and told him that his mother did not want to know him, that he had been a failure in Tralee and that he would always be a failure.”
The Brother who turned his wireless up full volume when a boy came to his room. He told him: “take that nightshirt off, you can scream now as much as you like, you little bastard”. What was on the radio, a céilí band or some popular show tunes?
The “holiday house” at Rath- drum purchased by the Sisters of Mercy in part from the profits of the forced child labourers in Gold- enbridge making rosary beads for a commercial company.
Perhaps, above all, the idea of how little it took to make such chil- dren happy. Adults now in their 60s or 70s recalled, for the com- mission, moments that had remained with them all their lives. What were those moments? Mostly, they consisted of “the simple fact that the staff member had not given a beating when one was expected”. In the upside- down world of this parallel Ire- land, where anarchy was law, cru- elty was care and innocence received a sentence to which the worst criminal would have been subjected, unforgettable kindness consisted in the absence of blows.
Yet, even as mind, reeling from the relentless degeneracy, latches on to such fragmented images, it cannot avoid the larger questions of how and why. What was it about our society that allowed it to consign one in 100 children to a system of deliberate and sustained terror? Essentially, independent Ireland sustained a system of prison camps for kids and allowed them to be run with arbitrary vio- lence, utter depravity and a sense of absolute impunity.
Such institutions are not rare, but they are usually associated either with totalitarian regimes or with the brutalising effects of war. Ireland did not have a totalitarian regime, nor was it at war, but it managed to create, especially for poor children, the effects of both conditions. Some of the methods used in the industrial schools are queasily reminiscent of images from gulags or concentration camps: the shaved heads; the use of humiliation and disorientation to destroy the inmate’s sense of personal identity; the turning of fire hoses on inmates; the setting of dogs on inmates; the beating of inmates while they were hanging from hooks on a wall. Dr Norman Stewart, who lived beside Artane industrial school, and later beside Dachau, was struck, as he wrote to The Irish Times, by the similar local experience of “observing lines of desultory prisoners as they trudged through the neigh- bourhood on their way to and from their workplaces”.
And the effect on inmates, as one survivor explained, was very like that of having been in a war: “It’s like men at war who experi- ence things cannot bring these things back to people in the street because people would not under- stand the situation that they were in. They dehumanised themselves. They dehumanised their enemy in order to be able to psychologically deal with killing them. The same is true when I came out of Daingean and I am looking at all of these people in the street and I am thinking they don’t know where I have been and they couldn’t understand me.”
HOW DID WE CREATEthis totalitarian, warlike system in a peaceful democracy? The simple answer is to talk of monsters and beasts. But the nuns and Brothers who ran these prison camps were not aliens. They were the daugh- ters and sons of ordinary farms and shops and streets. They were the good girls and boys from good families, the ones who behaved at school and did their work and wanted to bring joy to their par- ents by taking holy orders.
Most of them did not start as sadists. They learned, as guards and torturers have learned throughout the ages, to dehu- manise their victims and treat the horrible as normal. There is a telling phrase in one internal Christian Brothers report from Tralee about a Brother who was threatening to cause a scandal by his uncontrolled violence: “He has beaten one of these boys severely, with the usual ‘black eye’ result.”
The telling word is “usual”. The more systemic the violence, the more “usual” (and therefore acceptable) it becomes. As one sur- vivor of Artane recalled, “the place was built on terror, regular beatings were just accepted. What you’re hearing about is the bad ones, but we accepted as normal, run of the mill from the minute you got up, that some time in that day you would get beaten. The last two out of the washroom got beaten. The last two out of the boot room got beaten. The last two down to the piss pots got beaten . . . We accepted that. We didn’t even regard that as cruelty. That was the way the regime was run.”
This sense of normality was reinforced by the group dynamic – familiar from all corrupt institutions – in which those who have already been blooded in crime put pressure on those who have not. One Brother told the commission of “an incident where his fellow Brothers had burst into applause when he entered a room where they were, as it had been learned that he had punished one of his pupils by punching him in the face – previously he had not dealt out such harsh punishment.” Another witness recalled a group beating in which every Brother in the room hit him: “The old men were teaching the young men.”
This culture of violence, handed down from one generation to the next within a religious congregation, does not in itself explain the extraordinary scale and persistence of the system, however. For, even if it was a par- allel world with its own language and its own warped normality, it was not fully enclosed. There was a two-way traffic of horror. Abusers emerged from the indus- trial schools to attack children in schools on the outside. And abusers entered the system itself to take advantage of its vulnerable inmates.
There was also a constant flow of knowledge. It is not just that the Department of Education was well aware of the culture of vio- lence. That knowledge included the twin pillars of State and church. Eamon De Valera was told of the abuse in the late 1950s by a former Letterfrack inmate, Peter Tyrell (who later set fire to himself in London). John Charles McQuaid, the mighty archbishop of Dublin, was told directly in July 1962 by the Artane chaplain Fr Henry Moore of savage vio- lence, including the fact that “a hurley stick was used to inflict pun- ishment on a small boy”.
WITH THIS DEGREE OFoutside knowledge, the internal culture of brutality should not have sur- vived. It did so for three reasons: power, sex and class. The perpetrators abused chil- dren because they could. They drew that power from the immense stature of the church, its ability to command deference and to intimidate dissenters. The maj- esty of the church became, in the hands of the abusers, a cloak of impunity. More than anything else, the violence of the institu- tions was an expression of abso- lute power and the absolute cor- ruption it engenders. "Corporal punishment," says the report, "was used to express power and status." One Brother told the com- mission simply that "being able to beat the boys gave him a sense of power."
The degree of perversion with which this power was often expressed, however, suggests a group of people unused to having power and therefore incapable of wielding it within any decent limits. Products of a society with a strong sense of inferiority and living themselves within an author- itarian religious structure, some of these people came to see power as the freedom to make those who were weaker do anything that could be imagined. This expressed itself in the depravity of child rape. It was also manifested in at least two incidents, admitted by the perpetrators, in which Brothers made children eat their own excrement. In one of these, a Brother forced a 12-year-old boy to lick excrement off his shoes. A culture in which one could do anything one liked inevitably became one in which there was nothing one would not do.
THE SECOND FORCEbehind the system was sex. There was a reli- gious-based hatred of the body, expressed in the infinite variety of ways the Brothers found to hurt and violate the bodies of their charges. There was also a per- verted sexuality that swung between an obsession with purity and the rooting out of "badness" on the one hand and obsessive sexual predation on the other. The two sides are simply illus- trated by three aspects of the system.
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Boys were forced (on pain of beatings) to sleep on their backs with their hands crossed over their chests to ensure that they were not masturbating. A witness told the commission: “Sex? My introduction to sex was in the back kitchen of Letterfrack, jammed up against a boiler, getting my leg burnt and getting raped by Brother Dax.” And the system had a special place – St Anne’s in Kilmacud – to send girls (some as young as eight) from other industrial schools who had been raped, not to protect them, but to protect others from their impurity.
THE THIRD FORCE WAS class. This was a society in which the middle classes expressed their insecurity about their own status in a hysterical contempt for the poor. The function of the indus- trial schools was to punish pov- erty. The great majority of the 170,000 children were incarcer- ated, not because they had omitted any crime, but because they were categorised as “needy”. The needy were dangerous. In society as a whole, the violent repu- tation of the institutions served as a general warning to the poor. Within the institutions, violence was justified on the basis that, in the words of one Brother in Letter- frack, without it “there would be chaos”.
That violence was fuelled, though, by a psychotic hatred of everything that did not conform to the model of a good, respectable Christian family. “What are they,” one Brother remembered being told by a superior, “but illegiti- mates and pure dirt?” In Golden- bridge, girls were told they were “filthy”, “dirty” and “worse than the soldiers who crucified Christ”. Boys who were the sons of single mothers were told their mothers were “slags” and “old whores”. Children from working-class back- grounds were told their families were “scum”, “tramps” and “from the gutter”.
These warped relationships to power, sex and class were played out with nightmarish clarity in the institutions, but they were woven into the broader society. They were the dark shadows of a Republic that had never really come into existence. One inmate described returning home from Daingean to his father: “My father was [out] in 1916 and he spent a year in prison in England ... The one thing he said to me [was that] they were treated humanely, the jailors treated them humanely. I couldn’t say . . . back to him that I wasn’t treated humanely because I didn’t want anybody else to suffer my agony. I didn’t want to talk or do anything . . . Nobody would know what to do.”