Priest recalls beatings he saw

A priest, who was himself resident as a child at Upton industrial school, recalled the punishment regime there as somewhat more benign when he arrived in 1953 to what it became later.

Addressing the investigation committee, Father Michael O'Shea recalled being "really traumatised" by beatings he had witnessed there.

He remembered one incident where a Rosminian brother beat a number of boys with a strap "across the behind as many as 20 times each". Eventually a senior boy shouted "that's enough", and invited the brother to remove his collar "and take me on". The brother stopped, more from exhaustion than anything else.

He attributed the severity of some regimes at Upton to the type of men who were prefects or managed the school. The milder, more educated and cultured the man, the less abusive the regime. He was never aware of any sexual abuse at Upton.

Father O'Shea, a Rosminian priest, is currently a chaplain to the maximum security women's prison at Bedford Hills, New York. Born in 1944 at Doon, near Sneem Co Kerry, his mother died after giving birth to twin girls in 1947. His father could not cope with eight young children, so the five older ones were put into care. The youngest three were raised by relatives.

At the age of three, he was taken into an orphanage in Killarney, and at nine he was admitted to Upton in 1953. In 1956, at Rosminian expense, he was given a secondary education at their school in Omeath.

He stayed at Upton and the family home in Kerry during holidays. In 1961 he entered the congregation's Kilmurray novitiate. Later, when a prefect at the Rosminian industrial school in Ferryhouse, Co Tipperary, he "threw the strap into the River Suir".

At the afternoon session yesterday, Judge Seán Ryan, chairman of the commission, apologised to Mr Michael O'Brien who, he said, was "inadvertently included" in comments he (the judge) made following disruptions at hearings on September 6th last. Mr O'Brien, a former mayor of Clonmel, was a resident at Ferryhouse in the 1940s.