Sometimes a television programme unexpectedly provides you with answers to questions you didn’t know you had. Leathered: Violence in Irish Schools, shown on RTÉ 1 last night, also raised questions.
What was happening to the teachers, both clerical and lay, to make them beat little children savagely, and every day?
Where the hell were the parents?
Why has Leathered only appeared now, when it could have been made at any time in the past 60 years?
But it also provided answers to questions you may have already had about Irish society. Why are we so bad with authority?
Bad at responding to it and also bad when we have it. Terrified of taking responsibility.
Frightened of raising our hands. Obsessed with getting away with it.
Here were the answers, all laid out. Old men remembering the vicious beatings of their childhoods.
Casual beatings, ritualised beatings, random beatings. School authorities and church authorities and even the authority of their own parents were all implicated and also, crucially, absent.
In the classroom, it was open season on little children.
And, as was said on the programme, “the teachers did this with the full support of the State”.
Until corporal punishment was eventually banned in Irish schools. In 1982.
This was a hard watch. The memories of the physical torture were not as shocking – to someone of my generation – as the lasting impact the assaults still have on the adult men who endured them so many decades ago.
“It’s like the watermark on a £5 note,” said Gerry Coffey, who attended school with the De La Salle Brothers in Navan, Co Meath. “It’s there. It’ll always be there.”
His mother kept him out of school after a particularly dreadful beating. A garda came to their house on a bicycle to tell her that Gerry would be sent to a reform school if he didn’t go back. She chased the guard and his bicycle up the road with a kettle of boiling water.
Where is the statue to this woman? She did more than any civil servant, any party politician, any cleric.
Norman Murray’s mother, also from the Navan area, took him to the doctor and asked for a medical note requesting that he be beaten on his good arm, and not on the arm that was broken.
That doctor was Paddy Randles who, with his wife Mary, also a doctor, campaigned against corporal punishment.
Next thing you know, in the spring of 1969, the News Of The World arrived and reported on beatings in church-run schools.
“There were ructions in Navan,” remembered Mary Randles.
Her husband was read off the altar (if you don’t know, ask your parents).”
He lost half his practice,” his wife said.
Then a film crew arrived from America – there seems to have been no activity from the Irish media – and interviewed Norman Murray’s mother.
Her neighbours, she said, were giving out to her “for showing up the Brothers”.
What kind of place is this?
There were 14 sadliers in Dublin making leather straps for use in schools.
The canes were manufactured in workshops for the blind, which were partially funded by the State.
In a stroke of genius, Frank Crummey and Martin Reyolds and other protesters bought up all the straps they could – 29 of them – and burned them.
The teachers’ trade unions didn’t make a move.
In Kilkenny, the principal of St Kieran’s College had a traffic light system outside his office.
When the light was green you went in for your beating.
But much more terrifying were the random attacks on boys which could be visited on them by the same principal, Father McEvoy.
When he was 12-years-old, Eoin Costello was throwing a bobble hat around a classroom. He was punched twice in the jaw.
Three weeks later his mother took him to the doctor. His jaw still hurts sometimes.
Tim Quinlan was an idealistic young teacher in the early 1980s. His first job was in the O’Connell schools.
A colleague helpfully supplied him with a leather, but he didn’t want to use it.
One day another teacher came into Tim’s classroom and beat his 35 pupils for him.
The boys asked Tim if they could go outside and run their hands under the cold tap.
And so on and on.
“I didn’t come from money,” Gerry Coffey remarked.
The children of doctors with whom he was educated did not, he noted, get beaten.
The other thing that saved you was being good at football.
Two of the teachers identified here were great supporters of GAA football.
John Murphy, a former rugby international, was perhaps saved by his athletic talent. Still, as an adult he was surprised when he received a message about a support group for boys who had been allegedly been beaten. He got the message from the support group as he was driving to work one morning. He pulled over to read it, and he cried.
Damage, damage and more damage.
Should there be redress?
Should there be an inquiry?
Is it over?
A little boy went missing two years ago and none of us noticed.