Chapter 7 — Artane

Physical abuse

The grandmother turned to a clergyman named Canon O’Neill for assistance with her complaint. He wrote to Monsignor Barry,35 who passed on Canon O’Neill’s letter to the Superior General. After meeting with the Superior in Artane, the Superior General, Br Mulholland, wrote to Monsignor Barry on 26th February 1963: Further to my note of 23rd February I have now made full enquiries into the allegations in Mrs McCarthy’s letter. I have ascertained that she is a mental case with a strong antipathy against Artane School and that she is given to exaggeration in all matters she speaks or writes about. It is easy to note that she is a very dangerous type of woman ... Now just to give you an example of her powers of exaggeration I asked the Superior of Artane about the blow he was alleged to have given the boy on the 7th of February. He said he was talking to [the boy] in presence of Mrs McCarthy about the number of jobs he was in and of his leaving each of them without cause. To impress matters on [the boy] he gave him a tip of his hand and that is what is described as a staggering blow. 36 That will give us some idea of what to believe of the allegations made in the rest of the letter. As far as I could ascertain there is no truth in the accusation that boys are taken out of bed at 10p.m. and beaten “for any minor fault”. It must be only hearsay on Mrs McCarthy’s part. We all know how boys are inclined to exaggerate the slightest happening.

On the same day, the grandmother wrote a long letter of complaint to the Minister for Education, which will be discussed presently.

Monsignor Barry replied, accepting the ‘unreliability and untrustworthiness of her complaints’ and continued: I am sorry that you have been put to so much trouble but unfortunately, these sort of people give us all a lot of trouble and their complaints have to be nailed. I am happy to be in a position to reassure Canon O’Neill that the story as he got it was completely without foundation.

Physical abuse

On 1st March 1963, the grandmother met the Superior General by appointment. At the meeting, that lasted two hours, she discussed her grievances concerning Artane. On the same evening, the Superior General and the Provincial decided that the matter should be handed over to a solicitor if she persisted. The Provincial informed the Superior of Artane and commented: The Superior General had great patience with her and he thought by listening to her and getting her to unburden herself she would be pacified but no she left him thundering against the Brothers and against Artane and saying she was going to make certain that such things would not happen again. The Superior General was very beaten up on Friday evening and today. It is amazing the trouble which one strange woman can make but the Superior General has come to the conclusion that she is an able dealer ...

In her long letter to the Minister, the grandmother made many complaints of severe beatings of the boy by different named Christian Brothers in Artane. She also protested about his poor standard of education when he left the Institution. In addition, she described the incident that occurred when she and the boy met the Superior at Artane.

Officials of the Department of Education carried out an investigation and rejected the complaints. In the course of their inquiry, the officials interviewed the boy and his grandmother, and they received written statements from each of the Brothers involved, furnished to them by the Superior of Artane. Mrs McCarthy was unhappy with the way that she and her grandson were questioned. The officials’ investigation was hampered by the grandmother’s refusal to give the names of boys said to have witnessed the events involving her grandson and, in addition, they failed to obtain information from the chaplain, Fr Moore, who had some knowledge of the matter and was unhappy that he had not been approached directly but through the Superior of Artane. More importantly, he feared that his bond of confidentiality with the boys in Artane might be prejudiced. A genuine misunderstanding might have caused the failure to get information from the chaplain. In the circumstances, it would be unfair to criticise the inspectors on this ground. Whatever impediments there may have been to the inquiry, it nevertheless seems unsatisfactory that the officials did not question the Brothers involved. The report of the investigation did not, however, equivocate: From an examination of the evidence obtained through interviews, enquiries made by phone and the reports furnished by the Brothers concerned, in association with the grandmother’s refusal to give the names of the boys who witnessed [the boy’s] being taken from his bed at night for punishment, it is clear that the charges of brutality and sadism made by Mrs. McCarthy are without foundation. The fact that she is content to leave her other grandson in the care of the Brothers in Artane lend support to this opinion. Br Ourson37 did give [the boy] a shaking ... but considering the boy’s infuriating failures to remain in employment, he showed remarkable restraint. Outside this occurrence, nothing emerged from the enquiry to justify the charges of ill-treatment ...

The more senior official in the Department of the two who investigated decided that the grandmother should not receive a written reply to her complaint, because she had not co-operated by naming witnesses among the boys.

Br Reynolds was examined in relation to this in Phase I of the Investigation Committee’s inquiry. Referring to the view of the Brothers that the grandmother was dangerous, he said: I think in that particular case they had reasonably good foundation for the conclusions that they came to. I don’t particularly want to talk about the good lady in question, but I think if you examine the documentation in relation to that case it is quite clearly shown that Number one, an investigation was carried out and the considered opinion of the Resident Manager was that the incident she was complaining about didn’t actually take place. Nonetheless, they did issue a letter, not just to Artane, to all our industrial schools saying if punishments of this nature, if it should happen that they did take place it should cease if that is the custom or if it has happened. I am not sure why that happened. It would appear to me that that was their action to it first of all in relation to giving instruction to the various institutions and may well have said to the mother or the grandmother who was complaining, “we have done this. We don’t accept your complaint, but we have done this in relation to that complaint”. I haven’t documentary evidence in relation to that but I can’t see why else they would send that out to all industrial schools if there wasn’t some reason of that nature for it.

Br Reynolds was referring to a circular sent by the Superior General to the Christian Brothers’ industrial schools prohibiting the Brothers from taking boys out of bed at night to administer corporal punishment.

The letter, dated 4th March 1963, was a ‘Direction to all our Residential Schools’ and it stated: Should it be a custom that Brothers, Teachers or Night Watchmen take boys out of bed at night time and beat them that custom is to cease. I am now forbidding it. The Br. Superior is to call the attention of the Br. Disciplinarian, Brothers, Teachers and Watchmen who may have to supervise boys in the dormitory to this prohibition. Such a custom, if ever it existed, could only bring serious trouble and shame on our management. The Regulations regarding corporal punishment in our Rules and Acts of Chapter are to be adhered to.

In conclusion: A serious complaint was inadequately investigated and was dismissed on insufficient grounds by both the Department of Education and the Superior. The Superior did not deny that ‘to impress matters on the boy he gave him a tip of his hand’. The severity of the blow was subsequently disputed, but it is accepted that the boy was physically chastised in the presence of the grandmother. Neither the Brothers nor the Department of Education criticised the Superior for hitting the boy in this way. The correspondence reveals a lack of respect for the grandmother and her complaints. She is seen as a dangerous troublemaker whose complaints ‘have to be nailed’. The decision by the senior official in the Department of Education not to reply to the grandmother’s letter itself revealed a contempt for her complaint. The Department’s inspectors accepted written statements from the Brothers and did not question them directly, thereby affording them a preferential credibility. Although the grandmother’s complaint was totally rejected, the Superior still sent out a letter prohibiting a method of giving punishment that the establishment claimed had never happened. This odd fact suggests there was an apprehension that there was some truth in what had been alleged. Many witnesses before the Investigation Committee testified that they were taken out of bed and punished, thereby supporting this part of the grandmother’s complaint.

A case of documented abuse was summarised in the Opening Statement by the Congregation. It involved a boy who received treatment in the infirmary following a beating by a Brother: In 1964 a Brother gave a beating to a boy, apparently for misconduct with other boys. The nature of the misconduct is unclear. There is reference to this incident in the infirmary diary for June of 1965 (sic), from which it is clear that the boy was beaten on the back and legs. There is no indication that the matter was investigated or that any action was taken against the Brother.

The 1964 infirmary diary contained an entry regarding a boy who complained of a sore back and legs. The entry simply stated: ‘got beating by Br Lionel for bad conduct with other boys. Resting’.

In evidence, Br Lionel denied that this had happened. The Brother said that he was never reprimanded for this incident and said that he had no recollection of the particular boy named in the diary. He went on to say that he had indeed severely punished another named boy for sexually interfering with three younger boys. He described the beating as follows: I had to deal with just one incident of [peer abuse] ... I literally gave the person responsible when he had admitted doing it – he admitted openly to having done this to three children and I gave him literally a hiding. I mean a hiding ... I would have slapped him on the hands, I would have slapped him on the backside. It was literally – it was something to deter him from ever doing this again ... It stands out in my mind, it was the toughest thing I ever had to deal with.

A workman witnessed this beating and reported it to the Superior, Br Ourson. According to Br Lionel, the boy was brought before the Superior, where he recounted what he had done in the presence of the Brother and the workman. The Brother then claimed the workman said, after hearing what the boy had done, ‘if I was dealing with him I would have killed him’.