The Unchristian Brothers

and my sojourn with them

I have no doubt that my father loved me, and I him, but he sometimes had a peculiar way of showing it. For example, although I was destined to be educated – up to a point – by the Jesuits, he decided to send me not from my Froebel convent school directly to the prep school at Belvedere, but into the not so tender embrace of the Irish Christian Brothers. Many of my Froebel classmates, the boys, skipped this step and I came to envy them.

I have a feeling that this was an attempt to toughen me up. I was by far the youngest of four and I had three sisters. I had absolutely no interest in sport, whereas my father had played every game under the sun, even boxing, which he rather regretted. Perhaps there was an element of economy involved too. The Brothers’ education came free, the Jesuits charged hefty enough fees.

And so, in September 1966, shortly after the national fervour over the 1916 Rising anniversary, I turned up in the local Christian Brothers’ national school. When I say local, it involved a much longer walk than to the nearest lay-run national school which was attached to a big teacher training college. So, I’m guessing it wasn’t just a matter of economy.

My first teacher with “de brudders” was not a Christian Brother, so perhaps I had a gentler introduction to the new school life than otherwise might have been. He was Mr Hayes, a balding man with the modest remains of what had once been red hair; he was known by the boys, rather bizarrely, as Bimbo. Mr Hayes is probably best described as strict but fair and although he did “biff” with a leather strap occasionally, he used it relatively sparingly. I was seven, and after knowing only female teachers, being taught by a man was odd enough; being hit, deliberately, by a grown-up was even weirder.

By the time I was eight I had acquired a watch and Bimbo caught me looking at it one day. “Oho,” he said to the class, “the referee is looking at his watch!” and we all laughed obediently. I had no idea what a referee was. That was about the level of Mr Hayes’s humour.

My main memory of his class is of being asked questions in Irish and having no idea what they meant or what to say. I would stand in my desk, speechless, for an uncomfortable amount of time before he moved on to a child who had at least some idea of what he was talking about. At this time I was also discovering my inability at maths, or sums as they were called then. So, I now had dyscalculia to go with my dyspraxia. Not that I had ever heard either of those words.

English was my best subject – although I distinctly recall struggling to spell the words museum and bicycle, curious bed-fellows. Being good at English was not really a feather in my cap as the culture of the school seemed to look down on the language as that of the Foreigner and the Oppressor. On the other hand, I do remember learning by heart The Sands of Dee by Charles Kingsley in which Mary, calling the cattle home, comes to a most unfortunate end. We assumed that the Sands of Dee were somewhere in Ireland. We had never heard of Cheshire.

That was Second Class and Mr Hayes, while I don’t think he actually liked children much, didn’t despise us. In Third Class, we moved upstairs to the classroom of a large Christian Brother – being only eight at the time, most grown-ups were large but this fellow was huge, at least to us. His name was McKenna and he was from Northern Ireland, something that inspired in him a rather limited but fanatical sense of Irishness. He taught us the national anthem, Ámhrán na bhFiann, saying that any English boy of our age would be ashamed not to know the words of God Save the Queen. I seem to remember being taught to sing The Foggy Dew, and the line about “the angelus bell o’er the Liffey swell” which I always confused with the river’s notorious smell.

McKenna was scary and certainly more liberal with the leather strap than Mr Hayes. But he created a little class library that occupied one of the window ledges, something he didn’t have to do. He seemed to value reading and he encouraged a boy called Robinson to play the piano accordion for the class. On the other hand I remember him punishing a boy for some trivial misdemeanour by having him kneel at the top of the class, arms outstretched, holding in each hand a heavy book. Being very young, I accepted this as what happened in national school but I thought it was cruel. And certainly an underlying air of menace and cruelty is what I remember of that time.

Looking back after getting on for sixty years, I think McKenna saw us children as a kind of cross to bear. We were part and parcel of his vocation, as was his urge to inculcate a sense of nationalism in us. He didn’t like us much but he put up with us and doubtless did his best.

During the following school year, 1968-69, the menace and cruelty wasn’t underlying any more. In Fourth Class we were entrusted to the care of a psychopath called Brother Kelly. I think he was from Mayo, a large, coarse, uncouth man with no social graces whatsoever. I remember thinking – in as much as a nine or ten year old boy could – that he was uncivilised, and that a kind of savage had been unleashed upon us.

And he was savage. He clearly hated children, possibly because we threw his inadequacies into sharp relief. His approach to teaching, if it can be called that, was rote learning. Everything was, quite literally, beaten into us. We lived in constant fear and I suspect that none of us survived a single day under this beast without being beaten.

I didn’t take kindly to this and eventually, I had had enough. I simply refused to go to school. Point blank. Wild horses could not drag me to school and so, after a while, I was brought to a child psychiatrist with whom I played a kind of indoor pitch-and-put and had what I thought at the time were pretty banal conversations. He was a nice man and I didn’t object to seeing him except once when I caused a horrendous scene on the number 15 bus.

I think this may have been on account of a concerted effort to get me to return to school and I was having none of it. Anyway, towards the end of that school year I was accepted into the preparatory school at Belvedere and I reluctantly agreed to return to the beast’s classroom as there was light at the end of a very long tunnel. However, I had occasional top-up visits to the psychiatrist which required me to leave class early and it was clear that Kelly thought that this was ridiculous. And sometimes I had to leave early to go to a chiropodist to have a verruca treated. On one such occasion, Kelly roared after me, “all you need is a good kick up the arse!” Even at the time this struck me as an unlikely remedy for plantar warts.

Of course, nobody, not even the psychiatrist, ever thought to explore with me directly why I was refusing to go to school. Surely that was the first thing that should have happened? Perhaps I was asked, in a roundabout way, and I didn’t want to admit to being scared. I was a boy after all, albeit a very young one, and not only were we discouraged from crying, being scared was not “manly”. And there was as much talk in the Brothers’ classrooms of manliness as in a Victorian public school.

There was much theorising about separation anxiety because my mother had been gravely ill when was an infant. Had I been asked, I would have told them. I didn’t like living in fear of being roared at by a red-faced peasant and being beaten every day, sometimes several times a day. I don’t think this was an unreasonable position.

In those days, the beating of children in schools was commonplace. It was how children, especially boys, were tamed. I find it hard to think of my classmates in that school as feral creatures; we were frightened little boys. There was no bullying there; we were far too scareed of the teachers to start picking on each other.

My father, at this time, was private secretary to a government minister and he would often be collected from home in the chauffeur-driven Ministerial Mercedes. Occasionally, I would be dropped off at school from the same vehicle, something I dreaded as it was open to interpretation as swank. But nobody ever said a word. Apart from the ghastly Kelly, allowing me my first experience of completely blanking a grown-up. I knew there was no point in trying anything else.

This was mainly a working class school and I recall that some boys had terrible eruptions on their faces, and around their mouths. This afflicted only a handful of children, but I suspect that it was due to a poor diet. Dublin was a different city in those days.

The games were Gaelic football and hurling, both of which I refused to play, my resolution becoming even firmer as boys would come off the playing field spattered with cow shit. This was rus in urbe, less than three miles from O’Connell Street. I was not the only child to refuse; I remember sitting under a beech tree with a pair of very civilised identical twins called Russell and watching the others running around, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the cow pats.

Anyway, while nobody ever asked why I wouldn’t go to school, soon it didn’t matter because the end of the school year was in sight and I was moving on to pastures new where teachers were not allowed to use hit children, this being reserved to the headmaster.

I have one very clear memory of Kelly from around the time that I returned to his classroom. He was talking to a boy who sat at the back of the class, a boy who I remember was rather pretty. Kelly told the rest of the class to keep looking straight ahead and if he caught any of us looking around, he would, in his own words, beat the lard out of us.

God only knows what he was doing at the back of class. And I hope that boy, now aged 66, is alright. I don’t really care what happened to Kelly and I very much doubt that his sins ever caught up with him.

With few exceptions, that has been the way with the Christian Brothers. The organisation is notoriously devious and their determination to evade justice and run away from their victims has been brilliantly delineated in RTE’s documentary Christian Brothers: The Assets The Abusers.

My mercifully limited experience of the Christian Brothers suggests to me that, by and large, they didn’t “get” children, certainly didn’t like them, indeed, in many cases despised them.

No wonder the paedophiles amongst them operated in a sympathetic environment. Paedophiles don’t like children; they hate them. Children are, to them, occasions of sin. And so, abuse is not just sexual but sadistic. No doubt there were – are?- some Christian Brothers who were kind and nurturing and didn’t resort to inflicting physical pain on little children. But I suspect they were not many and were probably bullied by their colleagues.

The Christian Brothers with whom I came into contact would have joined the Order at the age of thirteen, before puberty in many cases. They were damaged men. How could they not be?

What remains of this very asset-rich Order – and let’s remember, with indignation, that it still owns and manages schools – is on the run from its victims. It is constituted in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to sue the Christian Brothers. They have said that they apologise unreservedly for the sexual abuse of boys and that they are “saddened” that victims were not listened to. And then they hide.

A Christian Brother called Kelly – not, I believe, my beastly teacher – was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1999 and sentenced to eight years. After his release, one of his victims took a civil case against him which was vigorously defended by the Order which had apologised to the victims in 1999. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

There is nothing Christian about the Christian Brothers. As Jesus is supposed to have said “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

Although their victims are getting older and dying off, there is still time for the Christian Brothers to repent and make full redress. But I’m not holding my breath.

Bring on the millstones…