Feckers (5 page)

7
Ignatius Rice

T
he Christian Brothers have long divided the Irish imagination between those who could see no good in them and those who could see no bad. For those who belong to the highly vocal modern tendency to decry everything about the past, the Brothers signify the tyranny of the dark and forbidding times before enlightenment descended; for those who cling to a nostalgia for bygone times and values, and baulk at the direction of the modern world, the Brothers represent a much maligned past reality with much more going for it than is nowadays acknowledged. Although the 2009 Ryan Report into abuses in Church-run institutions for children came down particularly hard on the Christian Brothers, the truth about them is probably somewhere in between the extremities of remembering.

Yes, it is true that, without the Christian Brothers, many young Irishmen would never have received a proper education, but it would be ridiculous to assert that there is no basis to the association of the Brothers with harsh classroom methods and sometimes with extreme instances of violence and abuse. In times to come, when balance again becomes possible, we shall probably acknowledge that the recent wholesale demonization of the Brothers was something of a distortion. But it would nevertheless be naïve to pretend in the meantime that the picture was as rosy as some of the Brothers’ more enthusiastic defenders have continued to aver. Many Irish males who attended any of hundreds of CBS institutions have toe-curling stories to tell of the brutality they suffered at the hands of their teachers. But despite the impression to be gleaned from much media discussion on the subject, such violence was not confined to Christian Brothers-run schools. Corporal punishment was an everyday occurrence in most Irish schools right up to the early 1980s. This culture of violence has many interesting aspects that are nowadays either not understood or misremembered.

For one thing, corporal punishment in schools was widely accepted within Irish society and was indeed regarded as a necessary part of an effective education system. It was not until the 1970s, following a campaign pursued mainly by one man, Dr Cyril Daly, that public opinion began to have second thoughts about the usefulness of beating the lard out of schoolchildren on a daily basis.

The abuses were facilitated and acquiesced in by a State-franchised culture of violence and sadism, sanctioned in the name of education and social control. By the late 1960s, a number of activists were campaigning on the issue, including a group called Reform, founded by a Dublin postman, Frank Crummy. The most courageous and consistently raised voice against this culture was a medical doctor, Cyril Daly, who, in his early thirties in the 1960s, began speaking out against the axis-of-evil comprising the Irish State and the Catholic Church. Dr Daly was, and remains, a practising Catholic who opposed violence against children from – odd as this may have been made to seem – a Christian perspective.

Since Dr Daly’s public career ended in the 1980s, with the banning of corporal punishment from Irish schools, his name may be new to most people under forty. But it is largely due to his efforts that Irish children are not today being flogged by thugs calling themselves teachers while the rest of us go about our business.

In November 1967, the
Sunday Independent
published a chillingly realized tableau written by Dr Daly in which he described a 13-stone teacher deploying a carefully stitched leather against a five-stone boy. He observed the attentiveness of the watching classmates, the spoken injunction that the recipient take it ‘like a man’. He used the words ‘assault’ and ‘blow’. He described the teacher pausing to say the Angelus before continuing the beating and the forced smile on the boy’s lips as he returned to his desk.

In 1969, Dr Daly collected 8,000 signatures for a petition demanding an end to corporal punishment. When he presented the education minister Brian Lenihan with the bound volumes of the petition, the father of the present-day minister for finance asked, ‘What do you expect me to do about these?’

There was little evidence of deference about Dr Daly’s interventions. He described corporal punishment as a ‘scabrous feature’ of Irish education and noted that Catholic teachers and prostitutes were the only categories of profession to employ corporal punishment in their work. Dr Daly observed that, although they had been abolished in the army and navy, and not ordered by a court for a quarter of a century, beatings continued to be inflicted on children of five or six. He explained how corporal punishment creates a tension in children that later causes depression and anxiety. He warned that beatings instil a false sense of moral responsibility, centred exclusively on a sense of externally imposed order.

‘The Irish child,’ declared Cyril Daly in what at the time was a controversial assertion, ‘is a human being with human rights.’ He appealed to the Church to desist from damaging both itself and the Christian message. He wrote an open letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, accusing the Church and its ministers of a betrayal of trust: ‘The Irish child has been dishonoured. He is being given an example in violence. He responds to violence. He respects violence. Violent men use violence in the Catholic classroom and say this is the way of Christ. And I say it is blasphemy.’

What jumps out of the archive is how, no matter how irrefutable the facts, the establishment defended the indefensible to the bitter end. When Dr Daly denounced the Irish education system on American television in 1971, he was declared ‘anti-clerical’ and accused of letting Ireland down in the eyes of the world. In 1969, when he spoke at a Labour Party seminar, the event was picketed by members of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) defending its members’ right to beat children. Brian Lenihan said in the Dáil that corporal punishment should be retained as ‘the ultimate punishment’ for children aged eight and upwards. In 1974, the then education minister Richard Burke described corporal punishment as ‘a necessary sanction to protect the majority of pupils from an unruly minority’. In one of Dr Daly’s surveys canvassing the views of politicians, a majority ticked the box indicating their support for abolition, but one politician, surveying the options to ‘abolish’ or ‘retain’, crossed out both and inserted ‘phase out’. That politician was Dr Garret FitzGerald.

Given all that is ‘known’ about the history of violence in the name of education, it comes as a surprise to many Irish people to learn that the Christian Brothers were initially set up in opposition to the culture of violence in Irish schools.

The order was founded in 1802 by a retired businessman, Edmund Ignatius Rice, whose philosophy of teaching was, in fact, formulated as a reaction to what he perceived as the excessively violent nature of education at the time. Rice was profoundly opposed to the physical punishment of children. ‘Unless for some very serious fault, which rarely occurs,’ he wrote in 1810, ‘corporal punishment is not allowed.’ The Christian Brothers’
Manual of School Government
, published in 1832, stressed the effectiveness of ‘mildness, affection and kindness’ as pedagogic instruments. ‘Blows,’ the
Manual
advised, ‘are a servile form of punishment and degrade the soul. They ordinarily harden rather than correct . . . and blunt those fine feelings which render a rational creature sensible to shame. If a master be silent, vigilant, even and reserved in his manner and conduct, he need seldom have recourse to this sort of correction.’

In 1825, the British Royal Commission on Education noted of the Christian Brothers-run schools that ‘the children are kept in good order and the masters seldom have recourse to corporal punishment’.

The crucial event in the shift away from this enlightened policy appears to have been the Famine of the 1840s. Simply by virtue of the Church’s existence and authority in a society with no other indigenous means of self-organization, the responsibility fell to the Church for creating cohesion and providing a moral and social framework to, in effect, ensure that Ireland could contrive to avoid such a calamity in the future.

The radical shift in the culture of the Christian Brothers can be traced to the immediate aftermath of that catastrophe, which followed hard on the death of Ignatius Rice in 1844. By 1851, the Christian Brothers’
Manual
had begun to drop mentions of restrictions on corporal punishment. This trend was consolidated in the 1880s by the passing of the Intermediate Education (Ireland) Bill, which provided for a direct connection between examination results and the payment of funding for schools. In effect, schools were left with a straight choice: adopt tougher teaching methods to compete or risk being passed over in favour of schools with less scrupulous philosophies. Subsequently, the Christian Brothers became markedly more successful, but also more notorious for the brutality of their teaching methods.

8
Ben Dunne Snr

O
nce upon a time, Irish men dressed in dark suits and white shirts with dark ties. To set off the whole ensemble, they sported black or tan shoes or boots, assiduously polished, and capable of announcing their arrival by the sharp clack they essayed as they walked along. This mode of dress seemed to go well with the demeanour of the grown-up Irish male. He tended not to say much, but nevertheless seemed to be reasonably clear about his purpose in life and what he thought about things. He tended to walk, if not exactly confidently, at least in a way that inspired confidence in the beholder. In short, he looked reasonably dignified and carried himself fairly well.

But forty-odd years ago, all this began to change for the worse. The modern average Irish man, once he has moved beyond the point of thinking about how he looks for reasons related to mating, is now a sorry sight indeed. Nowadays he wears not suits and shirts, but jumpers and slacks in terrible, bland, matching colours, beige and grey, with similarly coloured slip-on shoes made of soft material, which make no sound as he walks. The Irish male may still wear a suit while conducting business, or attending funerals, but he is always a little apologetic about it. He can’t wait to get home and change into a cheap tracksuit.

This mode of dress appears to have been accompanied by something close to an existential shift in the psyche of the average Irish male. Once he tended to move about in public on his own, joining with other males at certain appointed places: the public house, the bookie shop, inside the main door of the church. Now, he tends to go out in public in the company of his wife or girlfriend, who, it is clear, is the architect of his physical appearance. Men have ceased to be men and have become instead mannequins who model not merely clothing but an entire idea of what Irish manhood has become. In this vision of manhood, the male is not an autonomous being but the property of his wife, who disports him for competitive purposes in order to demonstrate (a) his docility and (b) her capacity to control every aspect of his life. In Ireland, we have somehow developed a culture whereby men have come to be regarded, and – worse – regard themselves, as the appendages of their female companions. For a man who is in a committed relationship with a woman to indicate independence of mind or dress is culturally interpreted as a sign of actual or potential infidelity.

If you observe such a couple walking into a teashop on a Sunday afternoon, you will, in a single tableau, be able to observe the true nature of sexual politics in modern Ireland. The man, dressed in his beige pullover, fawn slacks and suede shoes, is uncertain of himself, perhaps because he is self-conscious on account of his ridiculous apparel. He glances around uncertainly, as though waiting to be told what to do. He jerks his head tentatively towards a vacant table in the corner, and then to his female companion. She, noting his unspoken proposal, chooses a different table near the door. She indicates her choice by dumping her handbag on one of the chairs and taking off her Prada coat. The man then makes for the counter, looking backwards for signs of what his beloved might desire. You would think that men and women who have been together for anything more than a one-night stand would know one another’s preferences in the matter of beverages and muffins, but Irish men in such situations never seem to be confident about doing the right thing and invariably, on reaching the counter, have to go back to consult with their companions in order, perhaps, to avoid a scolding in the end.

Contrast this with the behaviour of, say, Italian couples. On entering the teashop, it is the man who chooses the table, by the simple expedient of sitting down at it. He is dressed in an impeccable blue suit with a white shirt. He is tieless, but only because it is Sunday. His female companion goes to the counter. She knows what he likes and is not afraid of anyone knowing that she is interested in pleasing him.

All this, or most of it, is the fault of one man. His name was Ben Dunne. In 1944, Dunne opened his first department store in Cork. Within twenty years he had become the wealthiest and most influential businessman in Ireland. For Dunne, the customer was king, or, rather, queen. His stores sold cheap clothes bearing the St Bernard label, usually simplified copies of garments produced at much higher prices by the larger international brand names. Dunne was an advocate of ‘self-selection’ retailing: he believed in piling the merchandise on the counter and letting people handle the produce before making a choice.

From modest beginnings Dunnes Stores grew rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s, bringing a semblance of international fashion within the grasp of the ordinary Irish housewife. In 1965, anticipating that shopping was turning into a recreational activity, Ben Dunne opened what would become his company’s flagship store at Cornelscourt in south Dublin, Ireland’s first drive-in shopping centre. It is said that, after his retirement, he and his wife would drive out there every Sunday to sit outside in the car park and watch the couples coming and going.

Until the arrival of Dunnes Stores, Irish men had tended to buy their own clothes. They went along to the tailor or outfitter, got measured up and went back a couple of weeks later to collect the new suit. But Dunnes changed all that, reducing the average Irish married male to a walking manifestation of his wife’s determination to define him.