Harrowing revelations about the historical abuse of children in religious-run schools have sent tremors throughout Ireland recently. Irish society is perhaps only beginning to come to terms with the levels of abuse carried out. The powerful testimony of brothers David and Mark Ryan (now aged 58 and 61), who were sexually abused by Fr Tom O’Byrne, a teacher at Blackrock College in Dublin, prompted other men of their generation to tell their stories.
Many men, and women too, reflected on their own past experiences, often leading to a reassessment of how serious what had happened to them in their youth actually was.
Prof Pat Dolan, chair of the Unesco Child and Family Research Centre at University of Galway, says: “One of the problems has been that emotional and violent abuse of children in our schools has been in the shadows of the sexual abuse of children. And it’s understandable why that is the case.”
However, “the frequency of older people in Ireland’s experience of having been physically assaulted or ill-treated in Irish schools is like a pandemic”, he adds.
Prof Dolan believes it is vital that myths about corporal punishment in schools in the past are debunked. One phrase which particularly infuriates him is the often-repeated “Well, it did me no harm.”
“This really further humiliates people like me” – survivors of physical abuse – says Prof Dolan, who is developing a programme of empathy education for schools. While some people do believe they emerged relatively unscathed, he suggests that expressing this point of view is not helpful. “Just because it didn’t do you any harm, what right have you to say it didn’t do harm to anybody else?”
Another myth, he says, is that “there’s a gender difference”, in that there is sometimes an assumption abuse did not happen in girls’ schools.
“We have not sought the testimony of what are now adult women who had these experiences as girls.” If that was done, “we’d have a tsunami.”
In an attempt to come closer to understanding the full spectrum of abuse suffered by Irish schoolchildren, The Irish Times invited women to share their stories.
It is true that there were lots of excellent and kind teachers, and many people had very positive experiences in schools run by religious orders.
However, some women them told us they were beaten with leather straps and rounders bats. Mocked and tormented. Pushed. Shouted at that there was a “special place” for girls like them. Whacked on the legs. Walloped on the palms. Skirts yanked up. Slapped on the head. Groped by the janitor. Told they were worthless. Taunted that they would be the first on the boat to England for an abortion.
When women now in their 50s and 60s were at school, many of them were regarded as errant, wayward, prospective sinners. Girls were seen as emergent vessels of male temptation. Spirited girls were future fallen women, so that spirit had to be broken.
This was the context under which corporal punishment was explicitly permitted by the Department of Education until 1982 and at times aggressively enforced by religious orders. The rules stated that physical punishment “should be administered only for grave transgression” and never “for mere failure at lessons. Only a light cane or rod may be used ... which should be inflicted only on the open hand.” Physical chastisement was not supposed to be immediate, and was only meant to be administered by a single, appointed individual. But this guidance, which already gave plenty of room for interpretation, was often ignored.
In response to queries, the the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy declined to comment. The Loreto Order said: “From the allegations of some of the interviewees for your article, it appears that regrettably, guidance on corporal punishment was not always followed in girls’ schools.
“It is inevitable that certain pupils would be affected by whatever form of physical abuse they may have received in school. It is inevitable that any psychological abuse which may have occurred of certain pupils in some schools would have a lasting effect on such pupils.
“It is now accepted that corporal punishment has no place in schools. The Loreto order would without hesitation issue an apology to any pupils who suffered, as a result of receiving corporal punishment during their school years in a school run by the Loreto order.”
Responses were not received from other orders contacted.
Prof Dolan goes as far as to say that while there were many good teachers, the system allowed for the “persistent torture of children”.
Corporal punishment was “a collaboration on all levels among politicians, policymakers, schools and religious orders”, he claims. Prof Dolan believes Ireland needs a forum, such as a truth commission, to allow people tell stories from their schooldays.
‘He put his hands around my neck. I kneed him in the groin’
“We were beaten black and blue with a leather and a rounders bat” at primary school, in [Co Offaly], in the early 1970s, recalls Rachel*. The school was run by nuns. One nun would “take you out of the class and down to the office and mete out whatever punishment she felt”.
When Rachel was eight, her father was working in local government. One day, that nun “said: ‘Go home and tell your father the bins weren’t emptied.’ My mother said: ‘Go back and tell Sr your father’s not the binman.’ I was eight years old and innocent, so I went back and repeated it. And she took me out of the class and beat the crap out of me for being cheeky. She’d hit you across the back of the legs, or across your knuckles, or she’d hit you with a pointer, and you’d have marks on your hand for days.”
There was no point complaining to your parents, Rachel says, because they’d just say “‘What did you do to deserve it?’ You eventually learned not to tell.”
Later, she attended Sacred Heart secondary school in Tullamore.
The paedophile Donal Dunne, a former Christian Brother who taught at 10 schools over 40 years – a trail of sex offences against boys and violence against girls in his wake – spent his last decade in teaching at Sacred Heart. He would eventually be prosecuted and jailed after he assaulted a child in 1995, when he was in his mid-70s, a case that prompted more of his victims to come forward.
Rachel remembers Dunne well. “He put me up against the wall one day, with his hands around my neck and his fist in my face, and threatened me to box the head off me.”
Shaking inside, the then-16-year-old responded by “kneeing him in the groin.” He let her go. “He never touched me again.”
Her experiences helped her become more resilient, she says, though she knows this isn’t the case for everyone. “You never showed that you were weak. It did make you stronger.”
While she doesn’t believe in dwelling on the past, “I am angry that they moved a known paedophile from school to school. You’d be angry about that, angry the school system allowed it.”
‘A janitor groped us in the hallways’
Emma* attended school in Co Dublin from fourth class in 1986 to the end of her primary education. It was run by nuns. There, she remembers a lay teacher who wore an enormous ring on her middle finger. “I remember it being the size of a large marble. She would rap you across the back of the head with it. You wouldn’t have to have been doing anything wrong. It was a reminder of her power, or a form of redirection.”
Emma’s sister was told by another teacher that “we were going to hell because our mother was a Protestant”.
In secondary school, Emma began doing clarinet lessons which were taught after hours in the primary school. A man who was employed on a casual basis there, “would be waiting, and he would corner you and insist on a hug. I remember at one stage him trying to bring me into a cupboard.”
Last year, concerned the man might still have access to children, she contacted An Garda Síochána and made a complaint. Despite the best efforts of gardaí and the current school management, they were unable identify the individual as there was no official record of his employment. “There was an official janitor who has since died. But this man seems to have been employed on an informal arrangement, cash in hand, possibly as a charitable thing.”
“I would have trouble explaining to people who are 20 years younger why we didn’t do more, or why we didn’t say more. But none of this would have been seen as that bad. There was a whole culture of it being normalised.”
She recalls her brother being hung up by his shirt in the changing room of his school by a teacher “and left there for the day. So everything that was happening to us is insignificant by comparison. Even if you did make a fuss about it, you often made it worse.”
‘A nun pulled my skirt up in front of the class’
Helen Harrington’s parents pulled out all the stops to send her and her four sisters to a Co Dublin school, where she was a pupil from 1958 to 1972. Some of the nuns were “really caring and lovely” but others were terrifying – “power freaks” who subjected the pupils to emotional abuse, she says. Some, Harrington felt, looked down on her because “a lot of people would have been quite wealthy. But because there were so many of us, my father was always about two terms in arrears.”
She remembers one nun in particular: “She took delight in making fun of me and my family in front of others. She was always looking for ways to bring us down. You didn’t have the right socks, you didn’t have the right shoes.”
Once, when she was 14 or 15, “this particular nun stood inside the classroom door and pulled my skirt right up” to chest-height “to check my knickers were school uniform ones.”
Other readers’ experiences:
“One incident still haunts me. Two woman lay teachers were chastising a little boy over the knee of one of them and slapping his bare bottom. I can still recall the utter stillness of us pupils witnessing the smirking faces of these two women” – a national school pupil in the 1960s.
“On a school religious retreat away from home when I was about 15, we had to go to Confession with a priest, face to face in a separate room in the retreat house. He asked me detailed questions about masturbation, such as, ‘Do you ever touch yourself in the bath?’” – a convent pupil in the 1970s.
“I am now 64 years of age, but I still vividly remember the physical abuse we received. We were mocked and criticised daily and physical punishment was regular. I recall one incident [after I] came a cropper off my bike and cut both knees. When I arrived late to class the teacher said the dreaded words: ‘Toe the line.’ She beat the backs of my calves while my knees bled. I was nine years old” – a Waterford convent pupil in the 1960s.
“[A teacher] would beat us with a large cane for the smallest misdemeanour. She made jokes about a girl in my class who came from a huge family and was disadvantaged. Instead of showing kindness, she would spray her with disinfectant in front of the class if the priest was visiting. We were all terrified” – a national school pupil in Co Dublin, late 1960s-early 1970s.
A spokesperson for the Department of Education said that since the introduction of a revised primary school curriculum in 1970 and the total prohibition of use of corporal punishment from February 1st, 1982, child protection requirements and procedures in schools have been introduced and strengthened on a number of occasions.
“In recent years, for example, the enactment of the Children First Act in 2015 led to the issue of revised child protection procedures for primary and post-primary schools in 2017, with an extensive programme of training put in place for teachers and school principals.”
As part of the department’s oversight of the implementation of child protection procedures for schools, the department’s inspectorate checks on compliance with key aspects during school inspections. There were a total of 2,979 Inspections carried out by the Inspectorate of the Department last year, of which 100 were Child Protection and Safeguarding Inspections (CPSI).
Inspections “are typically carried out in a school within a relatively short timeframe and result in published reports”.
The primary statutory responsibility for child protection lies with Tusla, the Child and Family Agency, the departmental spokeswoman said.
“The Department does not have powers to investigate individual child protection concerns or allegations, and is required to pass them on to the relevant authorities for investigation.
“Any allegation of a child protection concern brought to the Department’s attention is dealt with in accordance with the Department’s procedures for responding to child protection concerns brought to the attention of staff employed by the Department of Education. Under these procedures the Department refers child protection concerns to Tusla and any other relevant authorities, including the relevant school authorities and/or An Garda Síochána.”
*Names have been withheld at the request of interviewees. If you have been affected by the issues in this article, help is available. Contact One in Four (oneinfour.ie), Rape Crisis Helpline (1800-778888), the Samaritans (116123 or jo@samaritans.org) and HSE counselling services (1800-234112). If you have a story to share of your time in the Irish education system, you may email jennifer.oconnell@irishtimes.com
