Chapter 15 — Daingean

Physical abuse

The infirmary records for this pupil confirmed the injury complained of: ‘12.7.60 Accident, Cut face, Dentures smashed’.

The witness recalled that the incident centred round him calling the Brother by his nickname and stated, ‘In fairness to the man I don’t think he didn’t mean to hurt me as seriously as he did’. He said he lost three or four teeth in the incident and, contrary to the medical record, did not have dentures at the time. He stated that his teeth were not repaired in Daingean. He got the dentures at a later date when he left Daingean and joined the British Army.

Another witness present in the 1960s said Br Enrico was in charge of the farm and was a ‘Big tall man about 21/22 stone he was. He was over six foot, a big giant of a man’.

He recalled the second winter he spent in Daingean as being very cold, and the boys were told to go out and pick potatoes in November. He refused, and Br Enrico ‘went ballistic’. He described how this Brother kicked him around the yard. He was asked about the severity of the beating and he summed it up simply as ‘A grown man beating a young child, that’s what it was’.

Another witness present in the late 1950s recalled Br Enrico working on the farm, and remembered an incident where he witnessed another pupil being boxed on the side of his head by this Brother. There was blood coming out his ear and he remembered the boy being brought in and cleaned up afterwards.

A further witness present in the late 1950s said that he worked at the ‘horse batch’, ie he was assigned to look after the horses with three others. He said that Br Enrico and another Brother would hold them over the ‘shaft of the ponies’, and Br Enrico would hit them across the back with a rope while the other Brother used his fists.

Another witness present in the early 1960s recalled an incident when a farmer hit him, and the farmer complained to Br Enrico that he had given him cheek. Br Enrico used a hosepipe to beat him. He described Br Enrico as ‘... a big man, He was big, he was six foot odd and weighed about 28 stone. He was about in his 40’s ...’.

He also remembered an incident when he was accused of leaving a gate open, and a dog got in and killed some sheep. Br Enrico called him into the dairy and hit him with a box that broke his nose and the blood went everywhere.

Some of these complaints arose during Fr Luca’s period as Resident Manager, and clearly the giving of beatings was not confined to the Prefect, as stated by him. Br Enrico administered severe ad hoc punishments, as well as the more ritualistic floggings, although he was not the Prefect but the farm Brother. Br Enrico was brutal and unpredictable. Fr Luca’s comments that ‘On the corporal punishment, I don’t think it was excessive’ was contradicted by the facts. Corporal punishment: tradition and practice rather than regulation

As the above cases illustrate, rules and regulations about corporal punishment were, until the Kennedy Report in 1970, mostly a matter for the personal discretion of the Resident Manager and his staff. If the official rules and regulations were known to the management in Daingean and, in particular, if the 1946 circular was known to them, they were disregarded in the application of punishment in Daingean.

When asked by the Committee, ‘Were there rules and if so how were they known?’, Fr Murphy who spoke on behalf of the Oblates at the Emergence hearing said: There were rules and basically they were passed on from person to person within the body. So in a sense it became a tradition, if you like, of rules and regulations within the reformatory itself ... there was a Prefect in charge and he was the only one who could inflict corporal punishment for serious offences ... The other Brothers had the permission, had the right or permission, to inflict punishment on the hands only. So it was sort of a tradition, if you like, of corporal punishment for which there is though written protocol.

The circulars on corporal punishment, in short, did not alter tradition and practice, and it was only when Fr Luca was told that he could be prosecuted for corporal punishment that the management of the School began to realise their practices were in breach of regulations. In fact, the issue of corporal punishment had emerged as a serious problem a year before, with the visit of the Kennedy Committee.

This statement of Fr Murphy on behalf of the Oblates, as a representation of corporal punishment practice in Daingean, is completely at odds with the documented cases outlined above.

In 1967, the Government set up ‘The Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ under the Chairmanship of District Justice Eileen Kennedy to carry out a survey of reformatory and industrial schools. The terms of reference of the Committee were ‘To survey the Reformatory and Industrial Schools systems and to make a report and recommendations to the Minister for Education’.

The Departments of Education, Health and Justice each had to nominate a person to the Committee. The Department of Justice nominated Mr Risteard MacConchradha.16 In their Opening Statement during the Phase III hearings, the Department of Justice stated that it appeared from the documents that Mr Crowe17 was chosen because of his interest in child and youth welfare. He also had a working background in the prison administration section of the Department. His concern for the children caught in the system was obvious from the beginning. He wrote: The lot of the children, especially the boys, is very sad and there is an unbelievably entrenched “status quo” to be overcome, not least in the Department of Education, if there is to be any change for the better.