Just 108 allegations of physical abuse by teachers against pupils were recorded by the Department of Education between 1962 and 1982, according to a new documentary.
Survivors have spoken about corporal punishment in the RTÉ documentary Leathered: Violence in Irish Schools, which is on RTÉ One tonight at 9.35pm.
The programme questions the level of official record-keeping in schools during those two decades.
Figures released to RTÉ show that between 1962 and 1982, 108 allegations involving physical abuse by teachers against pupils were recorded by the department.
More than three-quarters of those also included allegations of other forms of abuse.
There were 87 allegations recorded at primary level, where children as young as four attended school, while 21 were at second level.
RTÉ said millions of students went through the state education system during those two decades.
The department also told RTÉ that it holds a further nine allegations for the five years after the introduction of the 1982 ban on corporal punishment in schools.
That brings to 117 the total number of allegations involving physical abuse recorded between 1962 and 1987.
RTÉ said this “suggests that allegations of physical violence in schools did not disappear after the 1982 ban”, and that “teachers in Irish schools remained immune from prosecution for ‘physical chastisement’ until 1997”.
Peter Kane, from Navan, Co Meath, told the documentary makers of being a 12-year-old who went to school every day feeling “there was an element of fear”.
Mr Kane described being given “clatters around the head, my face”.
“I think maybe six or 12 slaps I got off him with a leather strap,” he said.
“I didn’t cry, that in itself was a signal for him to carry on beating you and he done so, and bounced my head off the blackboard, bounced my body around the room, knocked me up against his desk, and at one stage I collapsed and fell on the ground because he done something to my back.
“Then he dragged me up, proceeded to beat me, I was in a lot of pain and I was basically sore all over. It took me a number of weeks to recover.”
Poet and author Theo Dorgan attended a school in Co Cork. He said school, for him, had meant “predator and prey”.
“If you looked at a teacher the wrong way, you would get a slap. We had a gradation of soft slaps to vicious slaps,” he said.
Mr Dorgan’s friend and former schoolmate, Mick Hannigan, added: “It was not so much a daily occurrence, but an hourly occurrence, class after class. If you got a sum wrong, if you got some difficult Irish poem wrong, then you were punished.”
Eoin Costello attended a school in Co Kilkenny. He described one incident in his classroom.
“I saw this shadow on the glass door at the entrance to the room. He marched... punched and then punched, and then turned on his heel and walked out.
“It never went away. Forty years, it’s never gone away, the impact of that punch in the face.”
Corporal punishment was banned in schools in 1982.
RTÉ said until then, under Department of Education rules, “only certain nominated teachers were permitted to physically chastise their pupils at primary and secondary level”.
Former Independent senator Jillian Van Turnhout, who led the campaign to have corporal punishment banned in homes in 2015, said: “Maybe nobody saw it as important enough to take a record, to file a report when it was received by the Department of Education.
“We have seen, for example, in the 2009 Ryan Report, that clearly showed us there was twice the incidence of physical abuse versus sexual abuse when it came to industrial schools.
“So why don’t we see similar levels when it comes to school reporting of physical punishment?”
Although the Government announced plans for the establishment of a full state inquiry into historical sexual abuse in schools run by religious orders, some of those who contacted the inquiry team, stating they had suffered physical assaults, were told their abuse fell outside its scope, the documentary found.
A Department of Education spokesperson outlined a range of measures that have been taken to protect children from abuse and neglect over the years.
They said “there is a very strong culture of child protection across the school sector”.
“The department takes child protection very seriously and considers that the protection and welfare of children is a fundamental responsibility of all involved in the care and education of children,” they said.