Chapter 7 — Artane

Physical abuse

Fr Moore’s report stated: The administration of punishment is in charge of a disciplinarian, but in practice is not confined to him. There seems to be no proportion between punishment and the offence. In my presence a boy was severely beaten on the face for an insignificant misdemeanour. Recently, a boy was punished so excessively and for so long a period that he broke away from the Brother and came to my house a mile away for assistance. The time was 10.45 p.m., almost two hours after the boys retired to bed. For coming to me in those circumstances he was again punished with equal severity. Some time ago, a hurley stick was used to inflict punishment on a small boy. The offence was negligible. Constant resource to physical punishment breeds undue fear and anxiety. The personality of the boy is inevitably repressed, maladjusted, and in some cases, abnormal.

Br Reynolds at Phase I said the Brothers were not challenging Fr Moore’s eye-witness account and commented: ... we are saying that if anything like that happened it shouldn’t have happened and it was wrong. The thing that surprises me about it was that he didn’t bring it to the attention of the Resident Manager.

Physical abuse

Fr Moore gave evidence to the Investigation Committee of the difficulties he had in bringing complaints to the Resident Manager.

He said that the overall atmosphere in the School was: very oppressive and it seemed to me to engender a great fear, an atmosphere of fear in the boys, generally, either in anticipation of punishment or actually experiencing punishment. In a word I would have described it as excessive and out of proportion.

He described incidents he had witnessed, including one in his report to the Archbishop in which he referred to a boy being severely beaten on the face for an insignificant misdemeanour in the playground.

He expressed a particular concern about the levels of corporal punishment used by Br Videl48, who was in the School in the early 1960s and about whom he heard consistent reports of his excessive disciplinary actions and beatings.

He recalled an occasion when Br Videl punished a boy who had snatched a comic from a younger boy in the playground. The Brother took the older boy to one of the classrooms: I was concerned at that stage about the evidence that I had been hearing about his severity, so I decided I would follow myself after him and I would stand outside the classroom door ... When I did that I counted the number of slaps he was giving the boy and my attention was distracted somehow after 19 slaps ... I would have considered that grossly excessive for the demeanour or misdemeanour, which in my view was tawdry.

He did not think the system in Artane was conducive to boys making complaints. He said: ... as far as I could see the boys were afraid to make a complaint. I was in a sort of invidious position because I had been instructed by Br Ourson, the Superior, that the boys were not to make complaints to me, that if they had complaints they should go to him.

While he went to Br Ourson with complaints of sexual abuse, he said that he was reluctant to do so in respect of physical abuse. Other Brothers advised him informally that this was not his function. For this reason, he directed boys who came to him with such complaints to go directly to Br Ourson. He does not know whether they in fact did so. He had not gone to Br Ourson about the Brother for this reason. He went instead to the Brother Provincial, but he did not know what the outcome was or whether the Brother was reprimanded.

Fr Moore’s evidence is important on the extent of corporal punishment in Artane and the difficulty for staff and boys in making complaints. In an environment where the victim is afraid to report it to the authorities, abuse will flourish. This and other evidence indicates that boys did not report abuse to the authorities because they would have been punished for doing so.

Dr Paul McQuaid returned to Ireland in 1965 after four years of postgraduate training in England and Scotland, and took up the position of Assistant Psychiatrist in charge of the Child Guidance Clinic in the Mater Hospital. In or about 1967 or 1968, he began to visit Artane on a weekly basis and he had free access to the Institution.

Dr McQuaid said that his general impression was that it was a daunting institution. The abiding impression he had was that of silence during school hours, notwithstanding the large number of boys in the place: The silence. So you had all these children, young boys, and virtually not a sound.

The boys’ unease was noticeable: It was a forbidding place, no question about it. There was a sense of just something about the way that the kids presented. You got a sense that they were intimidated, but again it was 40/50 years ago, times were different. They were there because they were within a juvenile controlled system and how do you control large numbers of kids.

He recalled an incident which happened one day when he visited the School unannounced: I walked in one day and as I said there was this silence, I was on my own and I don’t think I was expected in that sense. As I walked down the corridor I heard this (slapped hands together) like that (indicated), just as I walked down, the door opened and a boy walked out and his face was coming out and he had a black eye developing. I stopped him and he was very upset. He was trying not to cry. Anyway I said, you know, “What happened?” He said – I can’t remember what he said, but what transpired was that he had been hit by the Brother in charge, that’s what he said. I had no reason to disbelieve him.

Dr McQuaid returned to the issues of punishment and fear in Artane later in his evidence. He drew a distinction between national schools and other institutions: We know that particularly in institutions corporal punishment was used in a way somewhat beyond what it was used for in national schools in that it was an instrument of control.