Assaults on teachers would not be tolerated, a judge said yesterday after he heard how a national schoolteacher was assaulted in front of his class.
He had refused to go outside the door to explain why a pupil, a younger brother of the defendant, had been suspended, Waterford District Court was told yesterday.
Pupils were terrified as desks, a blackboard and the floor of the classroom at the Edmund Rice Boys' National School in Tramore, Co Waterford, were splattered with the blood of their teacher.
He had his nose broken and a nasal passage dislocated. He will have to receive further corrective treatment to his nasal passage.
Yesterday before Judge William Harnett at Waterford District Court, Shane Lindsay (20) of Bayview, Tramore, pleaded guilty to assaulting the teacher, Mr Eamon Pollard, at the school at Convent Hill on January 15th.
Lindsay, who was sentenced to seven months' detention, was told by Judge Harnett that assaults on teachers would not be tolerated.
In respect of a separate offence on June 14th to which he pleaded guilty - smashing a window of a Garda patrol car at Strand Street, Tramore - he received a further three months' detention to run consecutively.
Supt John Howard told the court that on January 15th Eamon Pollard was going about his normal business in the school and had occasion to check a young boy in connection with a football incident.
Following a discussion, the boy, a brother of the defendant, was sent before the principal and suspended. He went home crying.
Later that day, Shane Lindsay went to the school and invited Mr Pollard outside. When he refused, the accused went into the classroom and punched the teacher several times in the face.
The teacher sustained a broken nose and would need corrective treatment on one of his nasal passages.
The following day Lindsay went to the Garda station in Tramore and made a statement admitting the assault.
Mr Brian Chesser, solicitor, defending, told the court his client was a member of a family of six and his parents had separated in 1993.
On the occasion that the assault was committed, he said, the accused responded to an allegation that the teacher had assaulted his younger brother.
However, there was a conflict as to whether or not that alleged incident actually took place.
He said that his client never intended to assault the teacher. But he admitted that when the teacher refused to go outside the door to speak to him, emotions got the better of him and he used excessive force.
He continued to be remorseful and had made a public apology through the newspapers.
Imposing a seven-month sentence in respect of the assault, Judge Harnett said that it was an extremely serious matter for someone to go into a classroom and assault a teacher. "That will not be tolerated. He is somebody who has to learn some self-control because he obviously has none."
Recognisances were fixed, in the event of an appeal, in the defendant's own bond of £400 and an independent surety of £800.