Chapter 15 — Daingean

Physical abuse

This Brother was a valuable independent witness, because he gave an account of a flogging separate from the version given by the boys and by the records. His account was not in conflict with the written descriptions in the discovered documents as outlined above. Both agreed on the following: (1)Blows were with a leather strap on the bare back or buttocks. (2)The boy would be kneeling. (3)The disciplinarian would administer the blows. (4)On some occasions, at least two Brothers were present. (5)The office, or a small room, or the stairs by the dormitory were used. (6)The procedure engendered fear. Although this Brother had been in Daingean ‘a few years’, he found the sight of the boy being flogged an experience that ‘horrified’ him.

Fr Luca, who was Resident Manager from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, added to this picture. He wrote in his Statement to the Committee: I know you have heard it said at times that they were stripped, well there weren’t stripped but they might have to let down their pants and get it on the backside ... ... I would have to say I don’t know how many slaps they had. I never saw the boys being punished while I was there. I didn’t regard it as part of my duty to supervise that. I know that the boys were punished and I know it was left to the prefect to decide what the punishment would be for the particular, well I don’t like to call it crime, misdemeanour. It was generally at the end of the day, there would always have to be two there, never one. I suppose, there would have to be a person available. It seemed to be the tradition which was never questioned. It was never done during the day as far as I know. Nobody ever punished any boy except the prefect ... The place wasn’t in view. As far as I know, the punishment was always performed in the washroom. The stairs went from the washroom up to the dormitory. Now, I am sure they could hear the boys, they would know anyway, they knew what the score was.

He added: I was never present, but my understanding was that they had to let down their pants, lean over the form they sat on in the wash-up room and it was administered there.

He further stated: On the corporal punishment, I don’t think it was excessive. But any corporal punishment, I think, I would regard it as an excess. It was something which I don’t think it was achieving the purpose for which it was intended, to be a control and an aid to discipline. Because it was degrading ... you were attacking a boy’s human dignity.

In effect, Fr Luca confirmed all the other testimony: the Prefect with another Brother present administered corporal punishment, and it was administered at the end of the day in the washroom, near the dormitory, and could be heard by the other boys.

The Investigation Committee was shown the strap used by the Prefect in Daingean. It was about three feet long, with a narrower section at one end for use as a handle. It was half an inch thick and about two inches wide. It was not as flexible as a belt described by Dr McCabe, or ‘light’ as described by Fr Pedro, but heavy and stiff and bendable and, when administered with force by an adult on a child, it caused extreme pain.

The Investigation Committee heard testimony from several complainant witnesses about their experience of floggings.

One witness, who was there in the early 1940s, gave the following graphic account: this Br [Jaime9] was the man that did the flogging. He had a title of a prefect or something ... What flogged meant was that you got down – you took off your trousers and you got down on your knees and you went forward on the front and he flogged you on the bare buttocks.

He remembered that this happened to him on four occasions ‘in a room near the toilet and near the dormitory’. He also said that ‘... on two occasions I was taken from the dormitory and on two occasions I was taken from the yard to be flogged in this same room ...’.

He went on: I was flogged four times and the first time was when I was three or four months there and a chap ... tried to bully me. I hit back, it was only about two punches. I was reported and got flogged.

This witness recalled another occasion when he received a flogging because he removed his trousers before getting into bed, which he was not supposed to do as it was associated with ‘being immodest’. He took his trousers off before getting into bed as they ‘were always dirty with either cement and the blankets weren’t changed only every two or three months anyway or the sheets’. He added that ‘there wasn’t any kind of display’, and for that he got four lashes of the strap.

He spoke of another flogging: at the table there was some kind of a clothy thing on the table, not a tablecloth, you would scrape it off with your knife onto the plate, you would scrape the knife and my knife broke, it was that type of knife that the handle would fall off it. I was flogged for that. That could happen to anybody. That wasn’t a terrible thing, that wasn’t going to upset the run of the school or anything like that.

He recalled the fourth time he was flogged: the man that I was labouring to, he was spreading hard wall plaster and we were supplying him with the plaster. We weren’t very good builders labourers, we weren’t good at mixing the plaster ... it would get hard and he threw the thing down on top of me. There was a bit of blood from my head. I called him a name, he reported me and I got flogged for that.

This witness was complaining not only about the ferocity of the beatings, but also about their unfairness in his case. The description of the offences for which he was flogged could hardly be categorised as serious offences. His description of the flogging given in the 1940s is exactly like those described in the 1950s and 1960s.

Another witness, there in the late 1960s, gave the following account: [The Brothers], they had me on the steps, I got into a fight or something, they had this belt which was about a metre long ... You would go to bed and then you were called out of bed, you wore of flimsy sort of nighty which was down to your ankles. You weren’t allowed to wear anything else underneath that. You were brought to the bottom of the stairs where the dormitory was, marble stairs. You would kneel on the stairs. There was me and another fellow ... I remember him wetting on the floor because he was – there were three of us actually ... While they were doing this other guy, you would stand and watch them doing the guy in front of you. He would be on all fours. [One Brother] would stand on your hands and you would be kneeling down and as flimsy as the cotton night thing was that was lifted ... Up to your waist ... Then you would get – I think I had about six on that occasion ... I am almost sure after you had been done, you came back, (to bed) it was like a rota, like a line. I remember [ ... ] wetting himself on the floor next to me, I can remember it, it was steamy and smelly, I was concentrating more on that, I don’t know why. These things stick in your mind when you are a kid.