The contradictory attitudes towards brutality in Ireland expose a strange and disturbing tendency, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
WE KNOW that the systematic atrocities of the industrial school system came from the dark and violent side of Irish life. They were expressions of its screwed-up, hysterical relationship to power and authority, to sex and the body and to class and status.
There is a certain bleak comfort in this knowledge, for we can consign it all to a more ignorant, church-dominated past.
But what if, as well as expressing the dark side of our culture, the savagery was also enabled by one of the richer aspects of that culture?
For if you stand back from it, what you see in this history of organised sadism is not just the distortions of power, sex and class. It is also the special Irish capacity for double-think.
Double-think is wonderfully summed up by the old woman in the 1930s, asked by Seán Ó Faoláin if she believed in the little people, who replied “I do not, sir, but they’re there”.
This habit of mind probably accounts for the Irish talent for artistic invention, and also for the Irish sense of humour.
But does it also account for the sickness that allowed the system of child slavery and torture to thrive for so long?
If you look back on what passed for public discourse about this system when it was still going strong, it’s impossible not to be struck by the co-existence of two contradictory attitudes: (a) the system is not brutal at all and (b) its whole purpose is to be brutal.
The first of these attitudes manifested itself in levels of denial that would be funny if their consequences were not so horrific.
As late as 1976, for example, we find Sheila Killanin, president of the ISPCC, reporting a common public reaction to the organisation: “There is no cruelty to children in Ireland.”
In 1964, Michael Viney, a brilliant journalist who was soon to play a crucial role in opening up the industrial schools to systematic public scrutiny, could write in The Irish Timesthat "I accept that the lingering public image of industrial schools as Dickensian institutions is unwarranted and even, as one official put it to me, 'they are often superior to the better secondary schools'".
In 1965, Bryan W Roche, who put himself forward as a semi-official spokesman for the orders who ran Letterfrack and Daingean wrote: “The public have crazy ideas about industrial schools. They imagine beatings dished out as part of the day’s routine . . . In fact the cane has not been used on the hands or the backsides of those youngsters three times in the last six months.
“The walls [in Daingean] are not designed to prevent escapes. They are kept because of the shelter they give the playgrounds from the winds . . . There are no such walls in Letterfrack. Escapes do not worry the Brothers. They are seldom attempted . . . The Brothers are pleased that the schools have been highlighted and want the public to know more about them by calling and seeing for themselves.”
Yet, alongside propaganda like this that would have made Pravda blush a deeper red, there was the perception that these institutions were indeed “Dickensian”, that beatings were routine and that this was, moreover, a good thing.
In 1946, when the founder of Boys Town in Nebraska, Fr Edward Flanagan, visited his native Ireland and dared to suggest that “your institutions are not all noble, particularly your borstals, which are a disgrace”, he was roundly attacked in the Dáil by Gerry Boland and John Dillon.
In the letters pages of The Irish Timesthere was relatively little sympathy for Flanagan, whose warnings, had they been heeded, could have saved 25 years of continued abuse.
Strikingly, the attacks on Flanagan took the form, not of denials that the industrial schools were brutal, but of insistence that they ought to be so. One P O’Reilly, for example, wrote that the point of the institutions for the inmates was to “make their time in detention so unpleasant that they will never risk incarceration again”. As he explained: “Through original sin, children are naturally vicious little savages and it needs a rigorous discipline, with fear as a wholesome deterrent, to mould them into decent citizens”.
An “old teacher” agreed: “In a lifetime of teaching I always found that fear is the only deterrent for young or old . . . In my years of teaching, I found only one -ology effective with the young: that was stickology, not psychology.”
We did not believe in the terror, but knew it was there. The culture that could hold in its head at the same time the “truth” that the industrial schools were simply lovely, and the “truth” that they were properly brutal, was the same one that could believe that Charlie Haughey was a crook and a patriot. It could believe that property prices would rise forever even when it knew they wouldn’t, or that we could have low taxes and great public services.
Is that capacity for double-think a thing of the past? Yes and no.