Chapter 15 — Daingean

Emotional abuse

Shortly after that, he got involved in catching pigeons which annoyed his father, as there were too many pigeons in the house and so he ran away. He explained that he had taken 40 pennies from the gas meter at home before running away, and had fed himself on chips until the pennies ran out after about 10 days. He explained: I was found sleeping in an air raid shelter by a Garda ... I, like the young fellow I was, told him all my troubles. That I was after running away from home, I was in trouble with me father and it was after me catching pigeons. He said to me “don’t worry about that, sure I will see your father, sure that’s nothing.” Well, what he did is not alone not see my father but he added another, gave me another record of an offence, and had me up in court, and within two or three weeks I was down in Daingean.

He protested that ‘the whole total of what I did wouldn’t have come to a pound’. He was sent to Daingean for two years in the early 1940s. He felt isolated and alone. He said, ‘You could feel that there was no kind of friendliness ... you could feel that you were being looked at as if you were another heap of dirt that had arrived ...’. Of the Brothers he said, ‘A lot of them were harsh, but none of them ever got close for the right reasons. They never spoke to you like a human being’.

In Daingean, he was raped by three boys and was flogged four times and endured a desolate isolation. He told the Committee: for a year and eight months when I was in Daingean I used to pray that I would die in the night-time. It wasn’t until the last two months that I decided I am going to survive this.

He summed up the dreadful isolation he felt by saying, ‘... they didn’t talk to us, they didn’t have conversations, it was a terrible slip-up that they didn’t have conversations’.

The isolation he felt due to this lack of communication was perhaps best illustrated when he recalled a good time in Daingean: That’s one thing that I would like to say that there was one retreat down in Daingean ... I remember it, I think it was three or five days, it was a few days. There was some strange priest came down and he gave it. He gave some very good sermons, it frightened the life out of most of us ... One thing about him, I will always remember him, he had a stutter and he used ‘A.’ If a certain word was getting him, he would just say, ‘Three a days.’ ... I enjoyed those few days ... The fellows in the church, they were enjoying the sermon, it was in out of the cold.

This simple recollection of a preacher whose sermons and stammer brought the boys in out of the cold illustrates the desperate need the boys felt for human interaction. As this witness put it, ‘it was a terrible slip-up they didn’t have conversations’.

Fr Luca attempted to explain the disruption of relationships between the Brothers and the boys. Fr Luca wrote in his Statement to the Committee: Now I was coming to a place where there was nothing but opposition ... By opposition I mean there was always a danger of the boys regarding “them” and “us”.

He was aware, in other words, of a hostility, an alienation, that created a ‘them and us’ divide with the boys. In a document written in March 1972, he wrote: In this frustrating situation brothers were merely warders without the physical supports of a prison which led on a conflict of roles in the brother and a reluctant confusion in the mind of the boys, is he a brother or is he a screw. The large numbers in such custodial situations with declining staff numbers not only rendered meaningful relationships between staff and boys unattainable but repressive measures for the purpose of containment were the order of the day.

In his evidence to the Committee, he elaborated on this observation: When they would be at play a Brother would be on duty in the playground and looking after 120 boys. There was no opportunity to have any kind of personal relationship or personal contact with individuals ... it was a containment kind of situation ... it was kind of too much like a prison situation.

Br Abran, who gave evidence to the Committee, explained the relationship in more detail. He said: I think that was forced upon us by the boys themselves ... the boys would not allow us to use their first names. If we called boys by their first names they were beaten up by other boys because they were treated as being too familiar with the staff. In fact in the square boys would not talk to you for more than two or three minutes. They would walk up and down with you but they would have to leave after a definite period of time, otherwise they would be accused of snitching, to use their description, telling tales about somebody else and they would be beaten up when that particular person left the square.

At this point, he was asked if he was saying there was an alternative underground government in Daingean run by the boys. Br Abran replied, ‘I would say there would be to a certain extent, yes’.

The result of this ‘them and us’ divide was an extremely serious one. The boys were treated as frangible objects, one being as good or as bad as the other, and the boys who came from hardened families, many of whom had a couple of generations going through the reformatory school system, set the tone for staff relations. One witness, who had also been in Artane and knew the system, described how he coped with Daingean: At the end of the day you went in there, you sussed the situation out. I wasn’t ... a walking angel but I knew what to do. I didn’t want to be knocked about. When I was in Artane I was a monitor in charge of other boys. I was, as I say, street wise, I taught myself. If I go down the wrong road I paid the penalty. I was already being punished by being sent to these places. Why should I add to it?

Those boys, who could look after themselves, could cope with the two alternative governments within the School. They quickly moved up from being a ‘fish’ (a new boy) to being a bully. In the world of Daingean, one witness explained, ‘... it’s an unfortunate fact that if you don’t bully you are bullied’. As another witness put it, ‘... if you were a loner you got picked on, if you are on your own you are going to get slaughtered’.

Fr Luca estimated that 50 percent of the boys were recidivists who would fall back into crime. The other 50 percent did not appear in court again, but according to him, amongst them would be the boys who were broken by the system. It was a harsh world, where identity became obliterated. Fr Luca explained: Every boy who came into the School in those days would get a nickname, straightaway. He might not even be asked what his first name was. If he was from the country he be called the name of wherever he was from, and they would not know his name.

This system of nomenclature was confirmed to the Committee by a witness who was in Daingean in the late 1950s. When asked, ‘What was this boy’s name?’ he replied: I haven’t a clue. You never knew people’s surnames. Sometimes there was that many and you wouldn’t even know their first names, it was either Dub, Corky or Jack. Unless you knew somebody personally they used to keep their ethnic groups.